Michael Cera saves The Phoenician Scheme from Wes Anderson’s arrested development | Canada Voices

The Phoenician Scheme

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola

Starring Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera

Classification PG; 105 minutes

By now, the knocks against Wes Anderson are as familiar as the faces of Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel and all the other wizened members of the director’s repertory company of character actors.

The long-standing charges in the case of the People v. Anderson? He is a fussy and fetishistic stylist who prioritizes handcrafted storybook aesthetics over emotion. He builds fantastical, side-scrolling worlds that feel at once nostalgic and completely out of time, yet he forgets to populate them with actual characters. A decade ago, the Anderson look was synonymous with “twee,” but most critics have fortunately moved on from that argument.

Of course, the great fun of trying to box in Anderson was that you would inevitably find yourself boxed back out, with his startlingly prolific output – five films in the past 10 years – revealing a filmmaker who was evolving at a rapid pace.

Like one of the director’s finest suits, his films’ layers had layers of their own. The Grand Budapest Hotel is as sumptuous as it is righteous. The French Dispatch is whimsical yet poignant. And 2023’s Asteroid City, Anderson’s finest and thorniest film since The Royal Tenenbaums, offered extrajudicial proof that the director was guilty only of being a master aesthete who happened to have a heart as spacious as his brain.

All of which makes The Phoenician Scheme such a frustrating, crushing disappointment.

On one level, the visual complexities of the film are astounding to behold – his frames are exponentially more detailed than the already allusion-dense Asteroid City. Here, there are real-deal paintings by Renoir and Magritte hanging alongside fictional academic manuscripts whose covers are printed in Anderson’s signature geometric Futura font. And the mechanics of the story also house gears hidden within gears, requiring a history of 20th-century European commerce (particularly the Suez Crisis of 1956) to fully unlock.

Yet all the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal. In another era, The Phoenician Scheme might land its maker in directors’ jail. But Anderson knows that he has always been one step outside the game, and before anyone can even think of laying some double-jeopardy charges on the man, he’s vamoosed onto the next thing.

At Cannes, the global film industry contends with its very own impossible mission

Again returning to mine Anderson’s once-fertile ground of bad-dad drama, The Phoenician Scheme follows the tortured relationship between the cheerily unethical industrialist/arms dealer Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) and his various family members slash nemeses. There is his estranged daughter, a nun-in-training named Liesl (Mia Threapleton, daughter of Kate Winslet and expert at giving the straightest of straight faces). She’s long been on the outs with her dad due to her (not terribly far-fetched) theory that Korda murdered her mother.

There’s Korda’s brother, the maniacal and lethal Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is Anderson’s equivalent of the Terminator. And then there is Bjorn (Michael Cera), an unassuming young chap who is both Korda’s assistant/academic tutor and Liesl’s hopeless admirer.

The script that Anderson and his long-time co-writer Roman Coppola cook up is both ambitious and extraordinary in concept and curiously, aggressively flat in execution. (Perhaps it is time to bring the Wilson brothers Owen and Luke back into Anderson’s writing room?) It all revolves around an impenetrable fracas about a deal gone south involving Korda’s “Trans-Desert Inland Waterway” infrastructure project, which forces the businessman to go hat-in-hand around the world looking for funds. (Not unlike a film producer hoping to make something no contemporary Hollywood studio might touch.)

Cannes: The best, worst and most je-ne-sais-quoi moments of a wildly divisive festival

The movie earns a dubious distinction for being the first of the year to have a character utter the word “tariffs,” though Korda is no Trump stand-in. Rather, the character feels pulled from larger-than-life moguls real and fake – J.P. Getty, Howard Hughes, Charles Foster Kane, and Anderson’s own late Lebanese father-in-law Fouad Mikhael Malouf. But really Korda is no different a patriarchal jerk than Herman J. Blume, Royal Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou. A natural-born hustler trying to belatedly compensate for his fatherly failures.

In a way, The Phoenician Scheme is a ruse itself – Anderson’s bold gamble with other people’s money to play around with his favourite performers (Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Amalric) as if they were action figures made of porcelain, reconfigurable but delicate. By the time that Bill Murray shows up as God Himself, then the game has been long given away.

Anderson’s film does have one great parlour trick up its sleeve, though: Michael Cera. Given the actor and Anderson’s seemingly similar sensibilities and personas – it’s hard to imagine either man having a conversation above a whisper – it’s a small surprise to learn that the two have never worked together before.

Yet here they are at last, each pushing the other to step or perhaps just slightly leap into the unknown. When Bjorn is revealed to be not all that he seems, Cera flips the switch in such a delightfully effortless way that you wish the film were centred on his character, not del Toro’s.

Ultimately, though, The Phoenician Scheme is a sleepy, drippy affair with no emotional centre at its core. Anderson doesn’t exactly need to be sent to directors’ jail – there’s still too much going on here in the margins. But it might be time for a stint of (immaculately furnished) house arrest.