The Phoenician Scheme Is Wes Anderson at His Most Muted

Wes Anderson, who specializes in designing fancifully invented societies, probably doesn’t strike anyone as an angry person. But his espionage comedy The Phoenician Scheme, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, shows glimmers of something that might be called anger, or at least frustration, over the greed and immorality of people who have too much—and yet only want more. The picture is flat and schematic—even flatter and more schematic than usual for Anderson, who favors static camera work and sets that resemble meticulously decorated dollhouses; he also has a penchant for dividing his movies into discrete chapters with the use of descriptively deadpan title cards. All those features figure in The Phoenician Scheme. But the movie is more muted than usual for Anderson, both in terms of its color tones and its story. There’s something somber about it; it hints at a fringe of exhaustion on Anderson’s part, though it doesn’t seem that he’s tired of movies—more that he’s a little tired of the world.

Benicio Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda, the richest man in Europe, a ruthless 1950s business tycoon who has a knack for surviving plane crashes. The suggestion is that his immorality is the key to his immortality; he’s just too distastefully wily to die. After surviving one such smash landing in his private plane, he returns to his palazzo to consider his legacy, having decided that his eldest child and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), will be his only heir. (He also has a passel of young sons who figure in the story as virtual orphans; shunted off to the far sidelines, they’re generally depicted as an assembly of tiny, nervous faces.)

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But Liesl has other plans. For one thing, she’s a nun in training, ready to renounce all earthly belongings. And she has little affection for her father, trusting him not a whit; she even believes he might have killed her mother. Still, Zsa Zsa talks her into accompanying him on a multi-country jaunt, during which he’ll wheedle, cajole, and hoodwink his associates into supplying the money he needs for a big, wealth-generating infrastructure scheme, the details of which are so boring they’ll make your eyes glaze over. A meek and geeky insect specialist named Bjorn (Michael Cera) will accompany them, serving as both a tutor and a sort of guy Friday. Predictably, he nurtures a crush on Liesl, whose moonfaced radiance paradoxically gives her a kind of hot-cha-cha beauty, set off especially well by her demure white veil and habit. With her movie-star crimson lips and nail polish, she’s quite the dish, though she insists to her father and her prospective suitors (there’s more than one) that she truly wants to dedicate her life to God.

That fixation on a desire to believe in a higher power, especially within a religious framework, is one quirk we haven’t really seen from Anderson before. Still, he offsets it jauntily. The movie’s massive revolving door of actors in bit parts, customary for any Anderson affair these days, includes Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mathieu Amalric. Hope Davis plays a shrewd, strict Reverend Mother who shows up to inform Liesl that owing to her love of luxury goods (her father has given her a rosary made of glittering crystal and a gemstone-studded pipe, both of which she can’t resist toting around), she’s ill-suited for the convent. But before this exceedingly superior mother superior takes her leave, she makes sure Zsa Zsa is still going to fork over the dough he’s promised her for a new refectory. He’s not the only one adept at the art of the deal.

You might need to be a Wes Anderson purist to love The Phoenician Scheme. There’s nothing wrong with the performances: Cera, with his tootling phony Swedish accent, has an amusing savoir faire. Threapleton, with her take-no-prisoners stare, is charmingly enigmatic. But although there are a few good costumes—Zsa Zsa at one point sports a dashing pair of Russian Constructivist-influenced red, white, and black zigzag pattern pajamas—the film’s design overall feels curiously restrained. There’s lots of 1950s industrial gray-green; even a Marseilles art deco nightclub feels a little decoratively restrained, and the plot jumps around so much that we don’t get to spend much time there anyway. Zsa Zsa suffers from troubling dreams—apparently, he does have a conscience—which are rendered in understated black-and-white and have the sobering vibe of old Rockwell Kent illustrations—they may be the movie’s best feature. The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.