The Phoenician Scheme delivers on sincere devotion to family and flim-flam

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Among the many constants in Wes Anderson’s movies is that they reward repeat viewings. Anderson loads every scene and interaction with so many visual and aural details that screenings often feel like they’d benefit from being observed at slow motion through a microscope, so complete and intricate are the writer-director’s world-building set pieces.

The Phoenician Scheme is no different, and among his most satisfying pieces to date. Anderson’s latest film, starring Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton as the father-daughter duo at the center of the story, is available for streaming on Amazon Prime, and well worth the $20-ish for purchase or rental.

Del Toro is Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, an outrageously wealthy and shady businessman whose penchant for running rackets, fixing prices and engaging in “clandestine trade agreements” has earned him the moniker “Mr. 5%” — owing to his inevitable cut of every ill-gotten deal — and earned him so many enemies that his life is punctuated by a series of unsuccessful assassination attempts. 

That’s where we meet him in the first minutes of The Phoenician Scheme, smoking a cigar and reading a book as a hole is blown in his private plane, which then crashes in a cornfield.

“Some will mourn his death; others, inevitably, will celebrate,” the narrator intones.

Zsa-zsa survives, as he always does — this being his sixth plane crash. Indeed, he spends the majority of the film with bandages on his face and an arm in a sling. There’s a reason he travels with a box of hand grenades, which he hands out as gifts to almost everyone he meets.

However, this most recent attempt on his life comes at a critical moment. He’s on the verge of launching the titular “scheme” — the work of more than 30 years and comprised of a fuzzy infrastructure project in the fictional nation of Independent Phoenicia that combines canals with dams, railroads and tunnels and will require his entire fortune “plus a little bit more.”

He needs to cover “the gap” in the funding by cajoling and/or bullying a variety of equally suspicious partners — including his nefarious half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Meanwhile, his enemies, which are a cabal of gray-suited bureaucrats, are circling and bent on scuppering Zsa-zsa’s plans with market manipulations and worse.

He needs insurance, and it comes in the form of his daughter Liesl (Threapleton), whom he hasn’t seen in six years and is a pipe-smoking novitiate nun on the cusp of taking her vows. Zsa-zsa summons her to his moody Renaissance-era palazzo to inform her that she’s to be his sole heir, despite having nine younger sons. His reasons are his own, and he won’t divulge them.

Liesl agrees despite her suspicion that her dad had her mom killed — which he vehemently denies — and the two embark on a mad-cap adventure in the company of a tutor of etymology named Bjorn (Michael Cera), whose Scandinavian accent is so bad that Liesl repeatedly asks whether it’s “an act.” 

Along the way are characters including Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as a pair of basketball-loving Sacramento businessmen; Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham and Bill Murray as judges of Zsa-zsa’s deeds in the afterlife; Jeffrey Wright as a big-money ship captain/shyster; Scarlett Johansson as Cousin Hilda; and so many more A-listers and Andersonian personalities that it’s easy to start taking the phenomenal casting for granted. 

Del Toro and Threapleton shine throughout, with the former’s coldly ferocious, simmering, gravelly grumble accompanying a muscular portrayal that somehow telegraphs weariness and vulnerability at the same time. Ultimately, he’s devoted to his daughter, whose no-nonsense, self-styled piety is belied by a deep vein of Korda Family ruthlessness that — despite herself — makes him Zsa-zsa’s daughter, regardless of her actual paternal lineage.

Some critics doubt whether The Phoenician Scheme rises to the top tier in Anderson’s milieu, but I beg to differ. Any complicated father to a complicated daughter or complicated daughter to a complicated father will find much to endear them to the family dynamics, plus there are layers of understated philosophical and spiritual ruminations that get more satisfying after every experience. As Liesl says at one point, “What matters is the sincerity of your devotion.” “That’s it,” Zsa-zsa responds.

Stream it for purchase or rent on Amazon Prime.