22 May 2025

Wes Anderson’s sense of an ending

Unlike his mannered recent films, The Phoenician Scheme has both style and story.

Wes Anderson’s films either entrance or fail. I am a devotee of earlier work, up to The Grand Budapest Hotel of 2014, but The French Dispatch (2021) was intolerably twee, without any of the emotional depth that his best films have, that intuition of pain under the capering, that connection with childhood. Asteroid City (2023) was even more mannered, lapsing into self-parody.

The Phoenician Scheme, let’s say straight away, is a treat. Unlike its predecessors, it has a story to tell, rather than being an anthology of incidents. It uses all of Anderson’s stylisations but is not primarily about them, as his later films had started to seem. He takes his own cinematic language almost for granted here, rather than foregrounding it relentlessly. In a recent interview, he seemed almost to acknowledge that his “visual handwriting” had become a burden, a distraction from content: “You can tell it’s me… But, for me, each one is a different story, a different set of characters, and it’s a whole undertaking.” He even protested: “I am me, I’m not like me… The only thing I want is for people to look at the movie for what it is, not for what it’s like.” Recently, that had become difficult. Not here.

It’s 1950. Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) is one of the richest men in the world, a domineering international entrepreneur, frequently targeted for assassination by his rivals, plotted against by an international cabal. In the opening sequence, we see him survive, just, his sixth plane crash. Bloodied and battered, he emerges from a cornfield, just as reporters are gleefully delivering his obituary, trying to stuff a “vestigial organ” back inside his body. “It’s not as easy as it looks,” he says.

Del Toro, who previously played the deranged artist in The French Dispatch, is tremendous, magnetic and imperious, compelling your attention as much as Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums or Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson wrote the film for him and didn’t consider anyone else for the part. His character is modelled quite closely on the tycoon and art collector Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), dubbed “Mr Five Per Cent” for his custom of retaining that much interest in every deal he put together, including the Turkish Petroleum Company that controlled oil in Iraq and elsewhere.

Korda has a massive plan, the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme, exploiting an entire region. He must get the support of multiple backers, including Prince Farouk, the 7th King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia (Riz Ahmed), the Sacramento Consortium (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), the Newark Syndicate (Jeffrey Wright), his cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), and his sinister younger brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch, looking very much like Gulbenkian’s real-life playboy son Nubar). Meanwhile, the markets, particularly in the bashable rivets he needs, are being manipulated against him. Plus, as he mildly complains, people keep trying to assassinate him.

So he recruits his estranged 20-year-old daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), whom he hasn’t seen for six years, having sent her to a nunnery as a child. He will make her his sole heir, he tells her, so that “if they get me, you get them”. He shows her all his plans neatly arranged in a set of shoeboxes (it is a Wes Anderson film, after all). Liesl agrees, for a trial period, provided Korda abandons slave labour, famine creation and confining her nine adopted little brothers to a dormitory. Off they go to persuade the backers, accompanied by Korda’s new private tutor, Bjorn,an entomologist from Oslo who may not be entirely what he seems (a brilliantly funny Michael Cera in his first role for Anderson).

Threapleton, 24, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is a revelation. Liesl is touchingly resolute: she boldly stands up to her outsize father, earning his love, changing his sense of what matters most. The sense that this part must itself have been a big challenge for Threapleton at this stage in her career plays into the character beautifully.

The film’s emotional core is this evolving father-daughter relationship, which Anderson acknowledges comes out of both his relationship with his wife’s father, Fouad Malouf, a Lebanese businessman, to whom the film is dedicated, and the fact that he himself has a nine-year-old daughter. Those intimate origins can be sensed, for all the crazy capers: classic Wes Anderson, all over again.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is in cinemas now

[See also: Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame]