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Wes Anderson is contemporary cinema’s crown prince of mannerism – and still one of its most polarising figures. Whenever one of his new features appears, it provokes near-allergic reactions among detractors who simply can’t stomach the director’s whimsy and very arch storytelling style. To his admirers (this reviewer included), he’s a unique filmmaker, one who combines wit and brittle sophistication with child-like naivety. The Phoenician Scheme (in competition in Cannes) is one of his most enrapturing works of recent times, witty, packed with arcane literary and artistic references, but also full of plenty of refreshingly juvenile humour.
We’re in the early 1950s. The film’s hero, played by a dashing and mercurial Benicio Del Toro, is business tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda. He’s a sort of Elon Musk of his era but with more charisma and a better dress sense. There’s also a hint of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane about him – nobody, least of all himself, knows quite what makes him tick. Korda is forever having bust-ups in boardrooms and near-death experiences in his aeroplanes, which crash on a regular basis.
The tycoon has 10 children – so, fewer than Musk. Nine are boys whom he largely ignores. The 10th, a girl, is a nun: Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton). It’s to her he has strangely decided to leave the family fortune – if indeed there is still a family fortune to be left, and if she really is his daughter (which seems open to serious doubt). He may be one of Europe’s richest men, but a UN-like secret committee headed by “Excalibur” (a very uptight Rupert Friend) is sabotaging his business in every way possible.
As the wolves circle, Korda launches his most ambitious venture yet, the “Phoenician Land and Sea Infrastructure Scheme”. (The film never explains what exactly this is.) Much of the movie involves the tycoon and his daughter roaming the world, trying to persuade business associates to help him “close the gap” (that’s to say, stump up the cash he needs). On their travels, they are accompanied by the ineffably smarmy family tutor, Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera showing off a pitch-perfect Swedish accent).
The associates prove as eccentric and ruthless as Korda himself. Marseilles Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a shady French nightclub owner, looks as if he has just slipped out of a remake of Casablanca. Scarlett Johansson is a very long way removed from her usual glamour as his cousin Hilda, who is trying to build her very own kibbutz in the desert. Jeffrey Wright is all gruff bonhomie as the hard-drinking American shipping magnate, Marty.
Not everything clicks. The underground basketball game that Korda plays against his American associates, Reagan (Bryan Cranston) and Leland (Tom Hanks), is jarring and odd. The prolonged final reel stand-off between Korda and the equally duplicitous Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) is as clunky in its way as the battles between superheroes and villains that end so many Marvel movies.
Even so, the film is the usual pictorial treat. Anderson approaches live-action drama as if he is making animation, paying exhaustive attention to costume and production design. One of the great pleasures here is the extreme contrast between the fast-moving events and the slow-moving characters, who never show much emotion or surprise about anything. For instance, every so often, a group of gun-toting terrorists led by Richard Ayoade will turn up, preaching revolution, but Korda and his entourage will blithely ignore them.
Del Toro isn’t generally regarded as a comic actor, but he excels as the previously invulnerable businessman beginning to think his luck may finally be running out, and having a series of ever more bizarre dreams. In one of them, God (played by a hirsute Bill Murray) turns up to remonstrate with him.
Anderson throws in references to many other filmmakers. The warped-dream-like logic of the storytelling owes a debt to Spanish surrealist maestro Luis Bunuel. The meditations on religion and mortality wouldn’t be out of place in a Bergman movie. Each scene contains something to savour – a goofy visual gag, some deadpan dialogue or the use of a surprising prop (for instance, the grenades that Korda gives to guests as treats). This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again.
Dir: Wes Anderson. Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson. Cert 15, 101 mins
‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is in cinemas from 23 May
English (US) ·