The Phoenician Scheme

A cantankerous tycoon and his devoted daughter (a nun, so initially more devoted to Christ than to her dad) evade the attentions of a colourful phalanx of familial rivals and murderous assailants in Wes Anderson’s latest pastel-coloured bouquet of serrated whimsy.

As the schemer-in-chief, Benicio del Toro’s stone face is a perfect vehicle for Anderson’s deadpan style of humour, and his capacity to straddle even the thickest borders between good and evil, nasty and nice, callous and ingenuous, allows him to play with the darker tone of his director’s latest verbose, and unusually action-packed, screenplay.

Some Samuel Barber-esque semi-dissonances in Alexandre Desplat’s martially rhythmic score also delve into the required moral grey areas, while production designer Adam Stockhausen dips into a more muted colour palette which marks a comparatively shocking retreat from the fizzy sherbet of Anderson’s previous film Asteroid City.

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel balances out the general gloom by self-consciously bathing scenes in soft overhead lighting that strives to melt the picture’s icy heart, as well as replenish the feast for our eyes that we’ve come to expect from his illustrious colleague. For much of the time, the storytelling remains so recondite and the performances so arch that any emotional waters are too far below to be seen from this height; but of course this is another thing we’ve come to expect.

Periodic near-death experiences set in a monochrome netherworld, composed of abstract imagery and aligned by unexpected bursts of epileptic editing, are about as far as the film strays from Anderson’s neurotypical pattern. It’s a tantalising glimpse into a world where he followed Woody Allen into his Ingmar Bergman phase. There’s also fun to be had in occasional eruptions of cartoonishly violent slapstick, worthy of 2018’s Isle Of Dogs or even the work of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. For better or worse, most of the comedy is to be sniggered at from beneath’s one elaborate moustache, rather than guffawed at with a large, like-minded crowd. But assuming you’re in the right mood, that doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

Star names stride on and off this ornate little stage, displaying technically exquisite mannerisms despite being only marginally more animated than the countless delicate fruits of the art department’s labour. Although flanked by sterling work from Michael Cera and Mia Threapleton, it remains del Toro’s show.

His emotionally constipated mogul bears a striking resemblance to Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum; both are men who may be incapable of expressing love for their children by conventional means such as saying those three little words, yet it’s telling that these two films from either end of Anderson’s career use their deviously baroque attempts to connect with said descendants as a primary plotline.

It’s just as telling that a typical Wes Anderson protagonist communicates only in clipped, almost Vulcan elocution, devoid of any obvious emotional melody. They have characteristics, while their character depth is so obscured that it might not be there at all. Yet the director insists on having them talk endlessly to each other despite the restrictions of their own stoicism, and in its climactic moments the film’s temperature rises by a few degrees at last. Maybe this inscrutable indie darling is getting sentimental in his early middle age.

Wes Anderson is one of those rare artists whose films are so idiosyncratic that probably the only constructive comparison is to his previous ones, and this falls somewhere in the middle of a ‘best to worst’ list. It is tempting to rest on the crutch of the simple conclusion that if you love what he does then this will sate your hunger, and if you don’t then why are you even reading this review?

As ever, the upside of that conclusion is that his work has the reliability of comfort food, while the downside is that measurable signs of his artistic growth are thin on the ground.

-Stew Mott-