Wes Anderson’s visual fetishes are carefully curated and pristinely displayed in every perfectly composed frame of The Phoenician Scheme. The catalog of beautiful goods for viewers to covet is inexhaustible. There are telephones on private airplanes with enormous black plugs, mid-century department store apparel boxes repurposed to stow away paperwork, a crossbow, watches, eyeglasses, record players, hardcover books, hats, bow ties and ashtrays. Watching the film is like visiting a museum exhibit in which a lost world is preserved behind walls of glass.
The exquisite set designs are transportive. They conjure an “it was better before” world in which technology was solely inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. This retrofuturism is fun to look at, but the people posed inside these dioramas are as lifeless as dolls. Anderson places them inside of a weightless plot whose elements have been pilfered from early 20th-century young-adult adventure novels. Even an actor as shrewd as Benicio del Toro looks stranded inside of his middle-aged suits.
Del Toro plays Zsa-Zsa Korda, a wealthy con man who’s mastered the art of the deal. After he survives a plane crash with a vestigial organ in hand, he recalls a vision of God—a heavily bearded Bill Murray—with a host of Heavenly angels. Forced to confront his own mortality, he draws up a will. Korda passes over his 11 sons’ inheritance in favor of daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton)—although the question of his filial paternity is brought up intermittently throughout the narrative and ultimately left in doubt.
Covered by a white novitiate’s habit, the principled Liesl arrives at Korda’s palazzo armed with a strict sense of faith and propriety. She and Korda, her father/not-father, both agree to a trial period to determine if, as companions and cohorts, they’re a match. As they embark upon a road trip to sell potential investors on Korda’s Phoenician Scheme—the details of which become irrelevant as soon as they’re explained—their respective traits slowly bleed into each other’s way of being.
Liesl insistently insinuates her conscience into Korda’s amoral sphere of business dealings. Whereas Korda’s loucher life materializes, bit by bit, onto Liesl’s person in the form of cricket-green leggings, a jewel-encrusted string of rosary beads, eye shadow, lipstick and her first pint of beer. Makeup is all that Anderson adds to the 24-year-old Threapleton’s appearance to sexualize her. The relationship between her and del Toro, 34 years her senior, remains platonic but the film essentially documents their connection, a de facto love story. Michael Cera’s presence as Bjorn, a Nordic entomologist, adds comic relief to the trio’s travels but he isn’t plausible as a potential partner for Liesl, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise.
Threapleton is Kate Winslet’s daughter. When she delivers her lines archly, dryly and sullenly, she sounds like her mother’s double. Del Toro, too, seems to channel the cadences and timbre of Willem Dafoe’s voice—Dafoe appears in one of several scenes set in Bill Murray’s Heaven. This aural landscape is disorienting because it gives the impression that the movie has been dubbed into English, compounding the artifice of Anderson’s universe.
While Threapleton grounds Liesl and the film with a stolid backbone, her presence suggests the possibility of a more robust and relatable Phoenician Scheme. One in which Winslet stars as del Toro’s equal. But Anderson portrays adults interacting with adults through a detached adolescent’s lens. Human sexuality remains PG-rated, Spielbergian, yet to be realized. Men yell at and over each other to accomplish their nefarious negotiations, but the menace is either comical or undercooked. Nothing is at stake for viewers when the characters don’t suffer from any actual consequences. In this screenplay, women—and not talented ingenues—are absent players, reduced down to off-screen anecdotes.
The Phoenician Scheme’s charm relies on an expensive array of lacquered surfaces. For a couple of hours, the audience can step inside Anderson’s alternate, slowly fading, sweet-natured reality. But it’s a playground so far removed from ordinary life that only movie stars and their satellites have access to it. The director has created an enviable world onscreen, but it’s also an alienating one. I walked out of the theater feeling the way Mia Farrow’s character did at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo—cast out of a shimmering mirage of paradise.
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