'The Phoenician Scheme' Turned Me Into A Wes Anderson Agnostic
What if the characters never stopped reading checklists?
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I used to feel like I was powerless to resist Wes Anderson’s bullshit. I assumed that my extensive liberal arts education made it so that the times when I most resisted his shtick left me most vulnerable to his third act redemptions. Hell, I loved The French Dispatch.
Yet now, for the second movie in a row, I feel like I’m not only immune to Anderson’s charms but not even sure what he’s going for. It took me two watches to, if not *appreciate* Asteroid City, at least understand the gesture (a film about grief in the atomic age). The second watch at least crystallized what didn’t work for me (the framing device in which the whole story is TV documentary about a play), and cemented its standout scenes — like the one where Jeffrey Wright, playing a gruff general, reads his bluff-but-vulnerable memoir to a crowd at a ground breaking ceremony. That scene has stayed with me even if the movie didn’t.
There’s another single scene in The Phoenician Scheme that seems to transcend the movie around it. Michael Cera’s character, up until then a nerdy Norwegian entomologist, is revealed to be a CIA spy. He says the two personae are roughly the same since he based it on himself, but abruptly drops the accent and transforms into a Stephone Urquell 1960s smoking jacket version of his previous self. It’s not necessarily profound, but it’s fun, letting a comedic actor as brilliant as Cera briefly show his range.
Why does that scene stand out? Probably because it’s a rare moment in The Phoenician Scheme during which an actor’s natural charisma is allowed to show through their costuming, blocking, and deadpan direction. It seems to allow for the freedom of spontaneity.
Wes Anderson has gradually asserted more and more control over the look of his films, from the relatively loosey-goosey (yet still always meticulously planned and tasteful) look of Rushmore (above) to the deliberately stiff, almost two-dimensional cuckoo clock style of Asteroid City and now The Phoenician Scheme. The careful construction of Anderson’s movies was always obvious, and often an added value, but at some point a few movies ago I started to find myself incapable of losing myself in the action of any given scene, so distracted I was by all of the style choices. It became less like I was watching people interact and more and more all I could see was an animatic of Wes Anderson’s stage directions.
Move into frame. Read off a gruff checklist. Turn around, exit frame. Scene partner pauses, then shrugs. Smash cut to…
All of this seems very intentional and I’m sure it’s meant to convey… something, I just don’t know what it is. And lately all the additional layers of transparent artifice just seem to bury meaning even deeper. I’d been hoping that that elevator scene from The Phoenician Scheme that shows up in the trailer, in which Benicio Del Toro’s character recognizes the elevator operator as an assassin, they pull their guns on the elevator operator, he takes a suicide pill, collapses, and then Mia Threapleton’s nun character sprinkles holy water on him, all in the course of a few seconds, was more a succinct distillation of Anderson’s style fit for a trailer than an accurate reflection of the film itself. But no, it is all exactly like that, for an hour and 45 minutes. I kept waiting for the characters to stop reading off the rote checklists Anderson loves so much and they never did.
After the film was over I sat there cold, wondering if I’d missed something. I pulled up the plot summary on Wikipedia, which laid out everything I’d just watched. It was basically the way that I’d remembered it. I hadn’t missed any information, it just hadn’t left much of an impact. I guess it’s gotten to the point that the style choices are so overwhelming that I only glean the intended emotional content through a sort of passive osmosis. Things happen, but I’m no longer able to weight their importance. Wes Anderson movies have started to become for me like admiring a series of wallpaper samples. The actors act, and well, so far as it goes. The camera moves, in tasteful ways, through a series of curated, visually-pleasing environments. It’s all cut together with obvious care, but I’m unable to lose myself in whatever illusion they were intended to create.
Benicio Del Toro plays Zsa Zsa Korda, who, as we learn in the opening plane crash diorama scene overlaid with a radio announcer reporting the events, is some kind of shadowy international businessman whose specialty is negotiating clandestine trade agreements. For his troubles, he’s been nicknamed “Mr. 5%,” referring to the cut he takes from such agreements, and been the target of numerous assassination attempts, including the one that caused the plane crash.
Still bandaged from that one (and Anderson loves guys in bandages, see: Darjeeling Limited or Richie Tenenbaum), Korda arranges a meeting with his novitiate daughter (that’s a nun in training), Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter). He plans to name her his heir (he has nine other younger children, all boys), and she is to accompany him as he travels to all parts of “Greater Modern Phoenicia” to try to cover the gap in funding for his grand industrialization scheme from a series of wacky partners. Think: Confessions of an Economic Hitman as a screwball comedy.
Del Toro, affecting an impeccable sort of mid-century Chicago rich guy accent, represents one frequent Wes Anderson archetype: the rich, self-interested old bastard who has only recently begun to recognize his own mortality and wants to connect with someone before he goes (see: Royal Tenenbaum, Herman Blume). Liesl represents another, the female object of attraction with alluring eyes and a troubled relationship with her family (Margot Tenenbaum, Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom) . In this case, she’s the daughter of one of Korda’s multiple deceased wives, whom he’s rumored to have murdered, or arranged to have had murdered.
It all plays out in a sort of Big Lebowski goose-chase plot, in which we meet many interesting characters in the course of a quixotic journey that ultimately doesn’t accomplish much. On paper, it sounds like a perfectly good skeleton for a Wes Anderson movie. Only a skeleton is all it ever is, at least for me. The acting is so deadpan, the blocking so cartoonish and stiff, that every actor is essentially playing the same person, only with different costumes and accents — a whole universe of alternately costumed Nutcracker Men. The lines don’t really land, and so moments that were surely intended to be dryly humorous just felt dry, like trying to eat a baguette filled with beach sand.
In Wes Anderson stories like this, the “old bastard” character’s natural wildness used to peek through the deadpan facade. They were inherently unpredictable, wild cards. That was usually the funny part, or at least the interesting part. Even when that failed, there was often a sense of glee to the overwrought prose that the dowdily absurd characters spouted, usually as a comically transparent cover for their true motivation: intense horniness. That was what elevated The French Dispatch for me. Even when the characters moved and spoke stifly, the words transcended the direction — searing lines like “a weakness in cartography: the curse of the homosexual,” and “whatever you write, just try to make it seem like you did it that way on purpose” into my brain.