The Phoenician Scheme: Film Review
You know what you’re going to get with a Wes Anderson movie – his signature visuals, speedy line deliveries and breakneck editing – but the story can be hit or miss. In the case of The Phoenician Scheme, the story is a definite miss and it lets down the whole film.
This caper stars Benicio del Toro as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a wealthy businessman who appoints his only daughter, a nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), as the sole heir to his estate after many attempts on his life. To make up for a deficit in his finances, Korda, Liesl and tutor-turned-administrator Bjorn (Michael Cera) go on a tour of all his business acquaintances in Phoenicia to see if they’ll help cover “the gap”.
I really struggled to write that synopsis because I found the plot overly complicated and hard to follow. It doesn’t help that everyone talks at a rapid-fire pace and it takes my brain a second to digest all the information, by which point they are all already talking about something else. The trio just visit these business people to cut new deals and it’s terribly dry stuff. I didn’t care about – and therefore could not engage with – the story.
Thankfully, there are plenty of quirky characters and entertaining moments within the story that amused me. I particularly enjoyed Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as two basketball-playing businessmen, a recurring joke about hand grenades, Korda’s frequent plane crash-landings and his confrontation with Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). But the stars of the show are Cera as the sweet Swedish man Bjorn and Threapleton as the pipe-smoking, no-nonsense nun. They both bring the most personality to their characters and the latter is an expert at Anderson’s deadpan line delivery.
As always, the film is a visual feast, with Anderson’s typical colour palette and look. I was particularly impressed with the production design and the detailed sets and props. Anderson doesn’t pretend that his movies are set in the real world. They take place in a heightened whimsical reality with beautiful symmetrical sets.
This is also a place where everyone speaks too fast – way too fast – and delivers monologues without emotion. I didn’t love the writing but I’d like to be able to process what everyone is saying before it cuts to someone else and then back again. The expressionless line deliveries bothered me more this time around because it was overused and not enjoyable. Why cast Scarlett Johansson in a role and give her the most boring character with a blank expression and no intonation in her voice?
Anderson’s films have been more of a miss than a hit with me for a while but The Phoenician Scheme is the worst so far, purely on a story level. What a letdown!
In cinemas now