Going Straight

Wes Anderson stays on course in The Phoenician Scheme.

This piece contains spoilers for The Phoenician Scheme.

It's told from a child's point of view, which is forgivable, but maddening.

—Knave (Willem Dafoe), the afterlife defence attorney of Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro) in The Phoenician Scheme

I suppose I’m moved by this absurd performance.

—Marty (Jeffrey Wright), one of Korda’s investors

Watching a Wes Anderson film can feel like being given a present in a beautifully wrapped box, which upon opening proves to contain a smaller box, even more beautifully wrapped in even more elaborately patterned paper, which contains a third box, and so on, until you reach the last and smallest box, which contains nothing at all. But the whole package has been so assembled with such care, it seems ungrateful to be disappointed.

Or it would, if the tang of disappointment wasn’t an essential part of the Wes experience, one of the intended flavours, like the poisoned salts that season the last chapter of The French Dispatch (as a whole, Anderson’s fullest statement of aesthetic principles to date). The trick is to double down on both innocence and experience, the child’s dream of what adulthood could be and the adult’s nostalgia for the time when the dream compelled belief. Anderson’s heroes are geniuses, millionaires, talking animals, master criminals, spies, dandies, world travellers, extravagant narcissists almost to a man (the women are mainly bystanders, loyal or sceptical or both). But beyond a certain age they’re nearly all a little jaded, stuck in the gaudy prisons they designed and built for themselves so long ago.

Some version of this sadness clings even to Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro), the shifty industrialist and arms dealer at the centre of Anderson’s cartoonish caper The Phoenician Scheme, though neither melancholy nor introspection is exactly his bag. “If something gets in your way, flatten it” is his idea of a healthy life motto, a sentiment shared by his creator at least visually speaking: as usual in Anderson’s films, everything and everyone appears to be steamrolled into place, while camera movement is restricted to traversing the lines of an invisible grid.

This style advertises its own rigidity, yet is more flexible than is sometimes supposed: the systematic patterning is partly a means of keeping us alert to departures from the norm, like the sudden ominous close-up of Korda rasping “I don’t need my human rights,” turning his head towards the camera as if addressing us directly. The system in itself evokes both military surveillance and the drawings of children, perhaps implying an equivalence between the two: Korda, the most ruthless of Anderson’s flim-flam men, remains as much of a Peter Pan as any of his predecessors. More explicitly than in any previous Anderson film, the insistent frontality is also linked to religious art, Orthodox iconography in particular: Korda has black-and-white hallucinations of a medieval Heaven, where he kneels before the throne of a white-bearded Supreme Being, inevitably portrayed by Bill Murray.

Back in the realm of mortals, it’s Korda himself who plays God, especially when cruising the skies in his well-appointed private plane, a remarkably advanced model for 1950. Really the whole “cosmopolitan” ambience belongs to a later date, somewhere in the 1960s or even the early ‘70s, when Korda might imaginably cross paths with the version of Orson Welles who appears as himself in F For Fake, performing magic tricks for children at railway stations and spinning tales about art forgery on Ibiza. But if Anderson is unfussed about anachronisms, that doesn’t mean he isn’t well-informed about the history he plays fast and loose with: aside from being a generally recognisable archetype, Korda amalgamates a handful of specific real-life models, including Aristotle Onassis, the arms dealer Basil Zaharoff and the oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, sometimes known as “Mr Five Percent” (on no level is the film about Donald Trump, whatever some US commentators might think).

Korda also shares more than a little with Welles’ earlier avatar Charles Foster Kane, including his lonely rich-boy childhood and his immense mansion where he stockpiles priceless works of art (“Never buy good paintings,” he advises a protegé, “buy masterpieces”). This affinity is underlined at the outset when Korda supposedly perishes in a plane crash, cueing a précis of his career much like the pastiche newsreel in Kane—except that Korda unlike Kane is still alive, striding bloodied through the cornfield where the wreckage is strewn to interrupt his obituarist mid-sentence. Kane is a mere man, however magnified by the distorting lens of wealth; Korda is closer to an authentic figure of legend, whose fabulous fortune is merely one of his necessary attributes, though equally a buffoon whose survival and ongoing success can only be attributed to the grace of God.

Were we to consider any of this rationally, we might suppose that the whole movie is taking place in Korda’s head, not just the religious visions—which themselves may be prompted by brain injuries sustained during the crash, in turn brought about by the latest in a long series of failed assassination attempts (his secretary, not so lucky, is blown cleanly in half). At any rate, this latest brush with death is enough to prompt him to anoint a successor; unlike Kane he has many possible heirs, but he opts to bypass his numerous sons in favour of his sole daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who at twenty has recently entered a convent, but who is cajoled into joining him as he goes about securing capital for a large-scale engineering project in the imaginary Middle Eastern nation of Modern Independent Greater Phoenicia, largely desert as far as we see.

The obscurity of the scheme is a joke in itself: the implication is that a barren land will be made fertile, but exactly how this will work is never spelled out, nor is it clear how far the envisaged benefits will flow to the workers whose slave labour is needed to realise the design. Still, Korda views it not just as a monument to his business acumen but as his last best chance at personal redemption, spending most of the movie begging the indulgence of his business partners, played by the usual Wes line-up of celebrity guests. Finally, he chooses to sacrifice his own financial interests rather than walk away, by which point we appear to be dealing with something more metaphysical than a mere engineering project, especially as the climax pits him against his wicked brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose wrath is repeatedly described as “biblical”.

By any measure, redemption is something Korda stands in need of: unlike most Anderson scoundrels he isn’t likeable, though we’re encouraged to see him as the kind of magnificent bastard you have to hand it to. He may not have murdered Liesl’s mother, as Liesl at first suspects; for that matter he claims he’s never murdered anyone, even indirectly. Still, he admits to employing rough types for rough purposes, and brags about having engineered a famine; we’re never shown any of his victims up close, but we can picture them if we wish, as we can picture the offscreen children treated with doctored penicillin in The Third Man, which co-starred Welles as the charmingly wicked Harry Lime (and was produced by the Hungarian-born Alexander Korda, a major player in the international film industry from the 1910s to the 1950s; after a while you start to get a feel for how Anderson’s mind works).

For all its apparent linearity, the film’s own design calls for an artfully jarring mix of registers and approaches, from action-movie carnage to an almost 19th-century sentimentality (Little Lord Fauntleroy is cited, lest anyone suppose Anderson lacks self-awareness about how he’s viewed). The game of spot-the-allusion can be played endlessly, with the allusions themselves a means of uniting disparate worlds. Liesl fuses two characters from The Sound Of Music; a revolutionary along Che Guevara lines is named Sergio (Richard Ayoade), probably because Sergio Leone directed A Fistful of Dynamite; Mathieu Amalric plays a gangster and nightclub owner called Marseille Bob, a sobriquet that summons a whole history of French cinema from Marcel Pagnol to Jean-Pierre Melville, though his fez and white suit seem to be borrowed from Sidney Greenstreet’s Signor Ferrari, the corrupt proprietor of the Blue Parrot Cafe in Casablanca…

Often the whimsy shades into outright spoofing: Korda can sound like a Bond villain, or Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, but the scripted lines are even closer to Dr Evil from Austin Powers, with the same outlandish sang froid. Here’s Korda, addressing his daughter: “I was present at your birth. The midwife was a leathery old hag. I cut the umbilical cord with a pair of garden shears of my own design.” And here’s Dr Evil, recounting his own origins in an encounter group session he attends with his similarly estranged son Scott: “My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.” Who can’t relate?

Perhaps we’re meant to relate instead to Liesl, but for all Threapleton’s efforts to ground her there isn’t much to the character beyond her mordant tone and sustained glare at her progenitor, another of the film’s straight lines. The real standout in the cast is Michael Cera as Professor Bjorn, a timid Norwegian entomologist hired as a personal tutor by Korda, who has a dilettante’s fondness for intellectuals (somewhat after the fashion of Jeffrey Epstein, a more likely 21st-century reference point than Trump). Cera’s performance is a textbook illustration of what’s meant by “scene-stealing,” employing a lilting accent that gives the impression each syllable is being handled separately with tweezers: hearing him pronounce a word like “trol-ley” is a pleasure in itself. For a while, it’s possible to view the film as a three-way debate between Korda’s ruthless pragmatism, Liesl’s equally dogmatic faith, and Bjorn’s gentle scientific humanism—the latter entailing compassion for all creatures, from a would-be assassin slain in a skirmish to the live praying mantis he shows off at dinner.

Bjorn is so self-effacing he resembles a beetle himself, and too smitten with Liesl to leave his post, but he and Korda are close enough to being polar opposites we might anticipate their differences will eventually come to a head. What I didn’t anticipate was the third-act twist that saw him unmasked as the more competent but far less endearing Agent Carlson, a swashbuckling US academic turned spy, who was hired to keep tabs on Korda but chivalrously rescues him from quicksand before becoming the protector of father and daughter alike. Besides replacing the film’s funniest character with an even sillier but much blander self-insert, the revelation effectively erases whatever moral argument has been sketched up to this point—clearing the way for the introduction of Nubar, who’s enough of a pantomime villain to make Korda look decent after all.

Losing Bjorn is the biggest letdown, but another follows at the climax, when it’s briefly possible to suppose Anderson has found the courage to wipe out his entire cast (something I also hoped to see in The French Dispatch, which like The Phoenician Scheme does boast a significant body count). Alas, after a final visit to the film’s spectral Heaven, an epilogue finds Korda alive and well despite his newly modest means, contentedly running a Parisian bistro and spending the evenings playing cards with his daughter, who has meanwhile accepted Carlson’s proposal of marriage.

Even in an actual children’s film, this would be a little too neat and cosy. Still, taking it at face value is not obligatory: the scowling, bushy-browed Nubar is framed as Korda’s mirror image, hinting that on some level they’re one and the same (Korda much earlier refers to Nubar as “my father’s son”). Either the epilogue or the film in its entirety could be construed as Korda’s dying vision, a consolatory fantasy where he gets to show he’s really a nice guy. Or what we see at the end could be a genuine afterlife, where repentant sinners are granted a second chance. None of these options may seem terribly plausible, but this is after all a film where implausibility is much of the point, and where the quicksand of irony threatens to engulf anyone in search of fixed meaning. As for the scheme itself, we’re assured that in Korda’s absence it “continues to deepen and widen”—though as Liesl’s final voiceover admits, there’s no telling if this is a good thing where civilisation is concerned.