The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson's latest twee adventure is a colorful bore, as a corrupt capitalist trots the globe with his estranged nun daughter, dodging assassinations while trying to make the deal of a lifetime.

As regular readers of this space are aware, I’ve run very hot and cold on the films of writer/director Wes Anderson. Recent history, though, has swung in the warmer direction with a string of pictures I’ve all liked to varying degrees: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “Asteroid City,” “The French Dispatch,” “Isle of Dogs” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

That would seem to make us overdue for a clunker, and I’m afraid “The Phoenician Scheme” is just that.

The tale of a thoroughly corrupt capitalist traveling the globe with his estranged nun daughter, dodging assassination attempts while trying to put together the deal of a life time, “Scheme” is quite colorful and quite dull. It’s one of those movies that spends all its time winding up and never quite gets to full spin cycle.

They say the difference between a movie star and a character actor is that while an actor plays many different parts, a star always plays themselves. I think for directors it’s akin to whether they’re an auteur or not. A genre filmmaker (the Coen brothers, for instance) make all sorts of different movies, while an auteur just keeps making the same essential film over and over again.

Anderson is surely the most auteur-y of auteurs.

Anderson’s style is so distinctive, you can watch 90 seconds of one of his pictures and know what you’re seeing. His aesthetic has been both widely copied and mocked.

He uses large ensemble casts centered around one or two characters, with the same actors reappearing again and again like his personal thespian troupe. This includes Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston , Benedict Cumberbatch and Hope Davis — all of whom turn up here. F. Murray Abraham also makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo.

Whatever their respective acting style, all his performers speak in deliberately flat, affectless cadences like they’ve been dosed with Prozac before each take. Most of the action takes place indoors, often in carefully decorated spaces that someone brilliantly compared to dioramas. Even his plane crash sets seem curated. The humor — Anderson doesn’t do straight — is always very ironic and subdued.

Too subdued, here. I LOL’d exactly once, a genuinely funny throwaway moment (seen in the trailer) in which a would-be assassin swallows a cyanide pill, falls dead, and the nun douses him with holy water for good measure.

del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a widely despised tycoon known as “Mr. 5 Percent” for his habit of always demanding a perpetual slice of all his endeavors. He’s been known to use sabotage, espionage and even murder to carry out his ends, and circa 1950 his burgeoning enemies are turning his tricks back on him. A shadowy U.S. government agency (led by Rupert Friend) is threatening his grandest scheme, titularly centered in Phoenicia, by driving up the global price of bashable rivets.

Korda also has a remarkable habit of surviving plane crashes — six to date — though it seems clear these are not just being caused by a spectacular string of bad mechanical luck.

Sensing his eventual demise, and also laboring to save his massive deal — something to do with combining a dam, canal and railway to make the desert agriculturally viable — he summons his long-estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), from the nunnery where he banished her at the age of 5. On the verge of taking her vows, she is tempted with becoming his sole heir if he’ll accompany her on his grand journey to save the scheme. She’s not particularly invested in her dad’s plans for her, but holds out hopes of discovering the true fate of her dead mother while planning to give any money she inherits to her frocked sisters.

Cera plays Bjorn, a doofy bug scientist who has been recruited to tutor Korda’s nine child-age sons (both biological and adopted) that he keeps around like a mischief-making Greek chorus. Later, Bjorn gets recruited to be Korda’s adjutant and starts making moony eyes at Liesl, which is a pretty next-level creepy thing to do with a nun, or even a nun-to-be.

It seems with the huge price increase of bashable rivets (it’s clear Anderson included this just because he likes hearing his characters say this phrase), Korda must convince his partners to make up the budgetary gap. (Or as it’s presented with periodic chart displays, The Gap.) He’ll achieve this through a combination of browbeating, double-crossing and abject manipulation.

They include a pair of basketball-obsessed Americans (Hanks and Cranston); Korda’s Slavic second cousin, whom he also hopes to marry (Johansson); a French nightclub owner (Mathieu Amalric); the prince of Phoenicia (Riz Ahmed); a shipwright (Wright); and Korda’s own murderous half-brother (Cumberbatch), who with his wild hair and piercing eyes feels like he stepped straight out of a Dostoevsky novel.

Korda organizes his plans for each stage into shoeboxes, just because Anderson is very into knickknacks and containers. You just know at some point someone will start pulling things out and make a list of the contents.

As he experiences various near-death experiences, Korda has visions of heaven (in black-and-white photography, of course) where he is put on trial for his earthly crimes, with Bill Murray as God (also, of course). He will also engage in a sudden bout of unhinged, indecipherable hollering with each of his partners.

On the one hand, I respect Anderson for making the kind of movies he likes. Trouble is, his ability to invite other people into his little fetishistic dioramas seems to wax and wane. The characters onscreen never seem like authentic people; they’re only foible-filled constructs made to be put through his ironic twee paces.

Like, why is Korda so obsessed with risking everything he has to make this deal happen? It’s clear the man hasn’t an altruistic bone in his body, and everything he does is in service to his own ego. Even his appeal to Liesl is very calculated and controlling. His heart only seems to warm to her when she rejects his manipulations.

“Why would anyone do something I didn’t tell them to do?” he asks at one point, genuinely flummoxed when people don’t act as his lackey or immediately acquiesce to his current whim.

It’s much the same way with Wes Anderson movies. You either give in, or check out. I punched the clock on “The Phoenician Scheme.”