THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

Review by Rocco Simonelli

Wes Anderson is a stylist. After viewing his newest film THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, I did a quick perusal of reviews for it, and each one invariably commented on his adherence to symmetrical compositions, detailed sets, muted color palettes, controlled performances, and so forth. His detractors liken watching any new Wes Anderson film to dining at McDonald's, in that you know every time you do it will always be the same. Of course, it's important to remember that this very consistency is the foundation of McDonald's success.

Not that we want movies to be as predictable as a Big Mac and fries, but a consistency of style is not necessarily antithetical to great or good cinema. Hitchcock was a stylist, an enormously (no pun intended) consistent one. So was Sergio Leone (watch the opening sequence of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and ask yourself if any other director who has ever walked the earth would have crafted it the same way), and George Romero (though one might say his stylistic consistency was forced on him by the marketplace). Antonioni worked in a style so recognizable and infuriating (to some) that Orson Welles felt compelled to make an entire film lampooning it (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which I believe you can still see on Netflix, if you wish to. Though be warned that lampooning a style doesn't result in anything more entertaining or less infuriating than its intended target).

Then there are the anti-stylists, filmmakers like Sydney Lumet, who made many good films which shared a consistency of setting (New York) but not an instantly identifiable visual approach; or the remarkable Michael Curtiz, unfathomable to me as the director of both the diamond-sharp black and white melodrama CASABLANCA and the gloriously Technicolor VistaVision holiday classic WHITE CHRISTMAS.

I myself don't have strong feelings either way about Anderson's style, but I must say that after thirteen of his films, experiencing them is beginning to bring to mind an old Richard Jeni bit about sex in marriage after a number of years becoming like a dance, the steps of which both partners have committed to memory and recreate each time without variation ("I do this to you, one, two...you do this to me, three, four..."). You get a pleasurable result, but you're never surprised. However, in Anderson's case, when it works, it works very well (RUSHMORE; the deeply moving THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL; THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS).

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME does not achieve the heights of those Anderson offerings, but neither is it the failure some reviews I read have branded it. At their hearts, most of Anderson's films are about redemption, and this one is no different. The scheme it outlines is confusing, yes; I, like many other reviewers, could barely follow it. Benicio Del Toro's main character Zsa Zsa Korda is a rich and powerful financier of dubious morality who has miraculously survived multiple assassination attempts ("I myself feel very safe," he utters repeatedly to his nervous cohorts with increasing comic effect throughout the film). He has concocted a "scheme" to overhaul and build the entire infrastructure of some Middle Eastern country, and to have his company and its heirs collect a 5% revenue from its operation for the next 150 years. But there are powerful forces, governmental and industrial, who wish to thwart him, and the bulk of the movie deals with Korda's attempts to overcome their machinations. During this he is also is attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter, a Catholic novice Sister named Liesl, whom he wishes to make the inheritor of his empire upon his death.

Anderson and his co-writer Roman Coppola, as well as Del Toro in his performance, resist the temptation in our current political and cultural climate to depict Korda as a clownish stand-in for Donald Trump. MICKEY 17 made this mistake, resulting in one of the worst and most detrimental performances by an actor (Mark Ruffalo, of whom I'm usually a fan) in a movie this past year. The thing about Trump is, love him or hate him, he — like Korda in PHOENICIAN SCHEME — dodges and survives every bullet, both legal and literal. The media famously called John Gotti "The Teflon Don," but he nonetheless died in prison. I have utterly no doubt Trump will die in his own plush bed, or, perhaps, Elvis-like on one of his golden toilets.

Ultimately, what THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME brought to mind for me was another film I like more and more each time I see it, Barry Levinson's BUGSY, which also depicts a morally dubious dreamer who eventually sacrifices everything in order to bring about the fulfillment of his dream. Anderson's theme here is an old one, an ancient one: What profiteth a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? I know it's a hoary and timeworn notion, but now more than ever I fear it bears repeating.