The Phoenician Scheme

Or: The Holy Hand Grendae

The thing I like most about Wes Anderson is his work as a dialogist. The rapid machine like patter that carries little pellets of emotion, blessed or poisonous as they may be, is a modernist delight. Hifalutin though it sounds the scripts throughout his films are punchy, humorous, sweet. It’s one of the chief reasons why I was so disappointed in Anderson’s latest offering The Phoenician Scheme, a Hitchockian tale of suspense and damnation, but sadly lacking in cohesion or spirit. With a man blown in half in the first minute you could never call the movie boring, but it is certainly dull. Dull the way I knife is dull; with a little extra care and attention it could be salvaged to something great, but at present it will never accomplish the task that is set before it.

The movie has great promise principally between Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) a remorseless businessman and frequent survivor of assassination attempts and his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) a novitiate, equally ruthless in her dedication to Christ and the Catholic Church. Korda means for his daughter to inherit his vast fortune and complete his life’s work, the eponymous scheme which consists of … well there it all falls apart. One can argue that all business, all commerce, is, at a certain level, imaginary but the purpose of the Korda’s plans defy not only explanation but also comprehension, safe for that it involves slave labor and the creation of a famine, which is not, you know, good. Never a trust a company that doesn’t make or do something, in life or in art.

It does mean that Liesl, tempted by her fathers wealth and the good it might do for the poor and destitute, is obliged to follow her father and his collection of mysterious boxes, to the lairs of various businessmen and rivals in order to fund the enterprise. Therein we see a lot of wonderful actors yell their lines, a bizarre manipulation is proposed, and everyone does what Korda wants. Like I said, dull.

The more interesting bit is the struggle for Korda’s soul. Each time he faces an inhumation he flashes to a gloomy, monochrome heaven where his crimes are weighted the dead and the divine. These disturbing scenes are offset in the dance of father and daughter slowly figuring out each other “for a trial period” and bearing their own souls to each other. This can be quite beautiful and there are moments for both, and the film as a whole that flash with brilliance. Unfortunately neither del Toro or Threapleton quite makes dry monotone of the script to sing. There are moments for each but they are fleeting. More adept, or at least funnier, is the hapless Michael Cera as Bjorn Lund, an etymologist hired as a tutor but drafted as a Korda’s secretary. But the real title of the movie, the only one who as the children say, “understood the assignment” who captures that fast passed, even-keeled yet wildly passionate sense of you is Richard Ayoade as Sergio a communist revolutionary with a trigger finger not so much happy as ecstatic. It really is a crime he’s not in more of a film, but that’s the trouble with a star studded cast: a lot of luminous talent is confined to the vast empty stretch of space.

The Phoenician Scheme had the potential for being a great movie. It’s intricately carved, injected with suspense and pathos, and has the vestigial forms of jokes flopping about. Alas, an woodblock painting with poorly applied ink is just a spotty mess.