The Phoenician Scheme reminds us what matters.
Orson Welles’s 1955 cold war thriller Mr. Arkadin is the key to Wes Anderson’s psychological puzzle The Phoenician Scheme. Set in 1950, but exploring the mystery of individual temperament at the center of worldwide millennial conflict, The Phoenician Scheme poses Welles’s inquiry about human nature while appealing to movie-lovers’ delight.
Starting with a private plane soaring through the sky, The Phoenician Scheme involves us in the riddle of Eastern European tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), who fights off financial competitors and teams of assassins. He’s desperate to sustain connection to his nine estranged children including daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a dispirited novitiate nun, and a crazed adversarial brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). A saturnine bon vivant, Zsa-zsa is resolved to protect the family’s obscure heritage.
Anderson follows Welles’s artistic boldness (Mr. Arkadin’s fractured narrative and idiosyncratic archetypes), but in his own visually eccentric way illustrates that spiritual quandary is not new to mankind’s experience.
Flying high on whimsy, then plunging into financial chicanery, industrial espionage, worldly adventure, spiritual struggle, and the complications of interpersonal responsibility, The Phoenician Scheme shows the strange methods by which humans present themselves in the effort to communicate and find acceptance.
That concern is what makes both Welles and Anderson peculiar and extraordinary. Not to say that Anderson is equal to Welles’s genius, only that no other contemporary filmmaker is as art-conscious, flamboyant, and quirky. Zsa-zsa (known as Mr. Five Percent for his deal-making artistry) is an odd fellow like Anderson himself, which justifies the mogul’s weird behavior and his attachment to Leisl, adopting the spiritually lost girl to be his heir — safely, “on a temporary basis” — yet putting her through the wringer of absolute loyalty. Affection and mutual need come later.
According to the film’s Wellesian/Andersonian style, Zsa-zsa reveals to Leisl eight boxes (shoeboxes and a glove box) of secret family mementos corresponding to the eight juvenile sons he nurtures distractedly. This story structure is not consistent, but it matches Anderson’s imagery, which assembles bric-a-brac details conveying Zsa-zsa’s personality as if unpacking Joseph Cornell boxes. Anderson’s films must be viewed as with a magnifying glass for the minutiae that pop up, as kinetics and information and surprise. This links to actual Renoir, Magritte, and Rubens paintings in the film. (Zsa-zsa tells his sons, “Don’t buy good pictures, buy masterpieces.” He’s a conspicuous collector/purchaser/capitalist like Welles’s Charles Foster Kane.)
In The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson surpasses the Eurocentrism that ruined The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch. He seems to have exhausted his earlier disarming interest in American experience (as suggested by his xenophiliac animated movies Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox). Like Welles, a sense of emotional exile is evident in the way Anderson builds his own Joseph Cornell worlds. The toy-box environments are displayed with precision verging on obsession — as is Anderson’s embrace of exoticism. The reference to ancient Phoenicia and the ultimate farcical chase with Nubar in a space replete with Egyptian motifs (“You’re not human, you’re biblical!”) suggests that Anderson has gone from child’s play to an almost existential sojourn. It mirrors the tragicomic fantasy of Mr. Arkadin, where Welles deliberately overplays questions of identity, family, and the mystery of a jealous God.
Anderson, as much as Welles, is enjoyed for his formalism. Arch compositions, blinking edits, and intricate design function as control/constraint on sentimentality. But emotions come through nonetheless in moments of fleeting revelation: Michael Cera as Bjørn, a corporate spy and “moderate conservative” who loves Leisl, argues ardently against Nubar’s attempt to claim her as his own. It’s the film’s most enjoyable characterization. Later, Bjørn dives into quicksand to save Zsa-zsa — a movie first. They both emerge resembling the ancient Chinese Terracotta Army.
Interspersing The Phoenician Scheme are black-and-white scenes of Zsa-zsa’s dreams about his mortality, even meeting a white-haired and bearded God (Bill Murray). This self-examination seems glib (whereas Del Toro was actually more affecting as the desperate artist in The French Dispatch). Nonetheless, Zsa-zsa the enigmatic businessperson makes an ideal figurehead for Anderson’s struggle through contemporary moral ambiguity.
Zsa-zsa could be any flawed great man of our time, or our own mirror image. Remember Welles’s classic introduction to Arkadin: “We must accept him for what he is: a phenomenon of an age of dissolution and crisis.” That’s how fantasist Anderson personalizes the way the world works.
The millennial realization that the world is full of unscrupulous people might explain why Anderson’s storytelling leans to fantasy and youthful innocence. (It’s his J.D. Salinger habit.) Although less worldly than Welles, Anderson has a career that’s better financed, if not pampered, and that remains quintessentially American. (No wonder The Phoenician Scheme was passed over for prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.) Seeking the company of other emotional exiles — celebrities who populate his international acting company (Tom Hanks, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Hope Davis, etc.) — has become Anderson’s authorial tic. Yet they don’t fill the gaps in the loose story he has concocted with Roman Coppola — none come close to Katina Paxinou’s passionately fusing the vagrant elements in Mr. Arkadin. Unlike Welles, Anderson works in miniature, and The Phoenician Scheme is a miniature masterpiece.