Movie Review: The Phoenician Scheme

4.5 stars out of 5

I was so thrilled while watching this movie that only now, with a distance of a few days, do I realize that I didn’t totally get the ending, that maybe I passed out for a couple of key scenes in the last 20 minutes. But everything else was so much fun, and classic Wes Anderson.

The Phoenician Scheme is a road picture like The Darjeeling Limited, but the structure ends up being more like a video game, in which our protagonist must collect X number of points before reaching the end.

The protagonist/antihero is Benicio Del Toro playing the wonderfully named Zsa-zsa Korda. He is a ruthless, wildly successful, and seemingly indestructible business baron with an Elon-like brood of ignored sons and one estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), on the brink of entering a nunnery. Zsa-zsa hopes to reconcile with Liesl, taking her along on a journey to raise a missing amount of money to fully fund — what? Um, the Phoenician scheme. Which I understand to be a massive infrastructure project from which Zsa-zsa will greatly profit.

Also along on the trip is Michael Cera as the hilariously accented Bjorn, tutor turned executive assistant. He is falling for Liesl as we are too (but not as much as we fell for previous Anderson supercrushes Saoirse Ronan and Léa Seydoux). Good to see Cera biting into a more substantial comedic role than he’s had in some recent films.

Oh the people that Zsa-zsa and crew encounter in their travels! We visit Anderson alum Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Hope Davis. Zsa-zsa also finds himself in heaven a few times; is he temporarily dead or just imagining? I loved the tonal shift in these scenes, reminding me of Joel Cohen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth or any number of self-important perfume commercials. Even in the afterlife there are Anderson vets: Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, and the big daddy here, Bill Murray.

Playing “Spot the Star” is always entertaining, but the dialogue is so sharp and clever, the performances so deadpan hilarious, and (it is a Wes Anderson movie, after all), the littlest details in packages, signs, set design, etc. so finely turned out, that I felt Wes was trying a bit harder to really deliver than he has his last couple of times out.

Does Zsa-zsa deserve heaven? Redemption and forgiveness are major issues here. Wes Anderson tackles these topics in a satire of oligarchs and theocracy, with a side order of the meaning of family, all blended up in an old-timey screwball comedy. I may need to buy another ticket and see this movie again to catch anything I missed. Perhaps that was the Phoenician scheme all along.