The Phoenician Scheme

Anyone hip enough to have taken to Wes Anderson before the writer-director-producer became a household name/brand can tell you that the Anderson of yore is not coming back. The filmmaker’s evolution of style is ridiculously easy to chart. Simply watch his films in chronological order and see how his unmistakable signature pastiche has developed. His early films Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) display a penchant for symmetrical compositions, insert shots, and the font Futura. But they also had Rolling Stones songs, contemporary American settings, and human characters with real, relatable problems.

Nearly thirty years since his James L. Brooks-backed debut, Anderson has grown ever more devoted to a unique aesthetic inspired by all sorts of offbeat, esoteric world cinema. It’s been twelve years since “Saturday Night Live” parodied Anderson’s niche with a faux trailer for a horror movie called The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders. In that time, Anderson has demonstrated a complete aversion to reinventing himself or making movies with broader appeal. Anderson has a multi-billionaire benefactor/business partner in Steven Rales, whose Indian Paintbrush label has produced every Anderson movie since 2007 and not much else. The director also has seemingly unfettered access to many of the most talented film actors in the world, all of whom seem to show up any time he calls on them.

For a while, I was bothered by how Anderson’s career had progressed. The substance of his supremely resonant and rewatchable early works, best embodied by the flawless The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), was increasingly getting eclipsed by candy-colored eccentricity. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) easily remains my least favorite of the director’s films. That also happens to be his most decorated and highest-grossing production. In time, I’ve come to make peace with the reality that Anderson isn’t making movies like he used to and probably never will again. His early movies still exist and are incredibly easy to revisit in spectacular Criterion Collection discs loaded with worthwhile special features. The new ones keep coming and they have their charms too. They bear little resemblance to the world as we know it, but they still arrest with their museum-worthy mise en scène, their casts overflowing with world class actors, and their distinctive sense of humor that opts for steady chuckles over a scattering of big laughs.

The Phoenician Scheme is Anderson’s twelfth film as writer-director or thirteenth if you count The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, Netflix’s 2024 feature-length anthology of the four 2023 live-action shorts he adapted from Roald Dahl books (one of which won Anderson his first Academy Award). Either way you do the math, Anderson is very much a known property at age 56, adored by cineastes and mostly ignored at multiplexes. Though they consistently open big in tiny coastal rollouts, Anderson’s movies tend to fade fast at the box office and contribute little, if anything, to Rales’ massive net worth, even with the troupe of esteemed and in-demand thespians working for something resembling SAG-AFTRA scale.

By now, you should have a crystal-clear idea of whether or not Anderson’s brand of cinema is up your alley. Phoenician won’t move the needle for you and, in my opinion, it doesn’t hold a candle to Anderson’s ’90s and ’00s movies. But it proves to be another splendiferous and diverting production, this one being leaner, more intimate, and more character-driven than the likes of Budapest, the fragmented The French Dispatch, and his last theatrical release, 2023’s desert tale Asteroid City.

The film opens in 1950 with our protagonist, the wealthy and worldly businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), crash-landing a private plane in a cornfield. Korda is presumed dead, but narrowly survives, something he has been known to do. With his death-cheating days seemingly numbered, Korda reconnects with his estranged 21-year-old daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun to whom he wishes to bequeath his massive fortune.

Liesl receives what should be life-changing news blankly, troubled by the years her father has not seen her and by the persistent rumors that he had her mother killed. She agrees to tag along with her possibly not biological forebear as he tries to right his company by renegotiating with a variety of partners. I could say more about the plot, but the fact of the matter is its specifics eluded me, seemingly by design. What is the titular scheme and what exactly are the numbers that keep appearing on screen to indicate how close or far Zsa-Zsa is to realizing it? Maybe I’ll make sense of that on a repeat viewing, which I do intend to give this at some point. The gist is that Anderson, who shares story credit with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola but keeps screenplay credit all to himself, is being playful and whimsical. This is not the Anderson who tackled depression, addiction, and grief in Tenenbaums. This is Anderson building a colorful world and bouncing around it with so much panache and flair.

The world he builds here proves to be rather compelling and held my attention throughout. A lot of Anderson regulars — Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum — sit this one out and the upside to these sad absences is that there’s more time to go around to the more modest cast that is assembled. That cast includes, in the foreground, Michael Cera as a stammering “Bohemian” Norwegian insect expert hired as tutor and soon promoted to personal assistant. Honestly, I’d have expected Cera to pop up in an Anderson movie back around the time of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), but their inevitable union gives the actor some of his best material since 2010’s Youth in Revolt.

Also lighting up the screen in fewer days on the call sheet are Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, playing brothers who don their old college shirts for a high-stakes game of basketball against del Toro and Riz Ahmed that looks more like two-on-two H-O-R-S-E. (Undoubtedly, this is Wes Anderson’s sportiest sequence since he brought Whack-Bat to life.) We also get Henry Sugar himself, Benedict Cumberbatch, sporting the bushiest of facial hair as a nefarious uncle who might be Liesl’s real father and is definitely a problem. Scarlett Johansson does not get to do a whole lot as Zsa-Zsa’s second cousin. Nor does Willem Dafoe as he features on the fringes as part of Zsa-Zsa’s recurring near-death visions. While his name was missing from promotional materials, Bill Murray also pops up briefly but amusingly in a couple of those black and white scenes of moral judgment, gladly reuniting with Anderson for a tenth time. In his third Anderson film, Jeffrey Wright also makes the most of his limited opportunities, partaking in an amusing blood transfusion scene.

All of this should make it clear that The Phoenician Scheme is a Wes Anderson film for Wes Anderson fans, who should heartily enjoy this sharp, witty comic adventure. Those who have not found artistry and entertainment value in Anderson’s past few outings are unlikely to change their tune. But I myself have gradually done some of that, growing more appreciative of the filmmaker’s second-tier work as the film industry continues to wipe out mid-budget movies and movies for adults in favor of soulless, algorithm-tested content for subscription streaming services. Back in 2014, when I was disappointed by Grand Budapest Hotel, I had dozens of other triumphs worthy of celebrating, from high-quality mainstream attractions (e.g. Interstellar, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) to audience-finding arthouse fare (like Foxcatcher and Boyhood). Halfway through 2025, there’s been little in either class worthy of discussion and debate. That’s depressing news for the current state of cinema, but helps ensure that Phoenician is noticed and appreciated by the thoughtful moviegoers who have been kept hungry for too long.