Photo © Focus Features/Universal Pictures
The Phoencian Scheme
Benicio Del Toro, Michael Cera, and Mia Threapleton in The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Credit Wes Anderson as one of the few distinctive writer-directors still working on the outskirts of Hollywood. He’s a filmmaker with his own style, but does that style elevate him to the top ranks of cinema?
The Phoenician Scheme won’t change the way anyone answers that question. You’re probably already an Anderson fan if you’re paying to see it—and if not, you won’t be persuaded by his latest project. It’s a movie about the artifice of moviemaking, populated by characters too obviously quirky to care about, delivered with a satisfyingly mordant sense of humor. With The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson stitches together another of his imaginary worlds, a playhouse whose plot is a Rube Goldberg contraption that pulls a cast of characters through carefully curated sets.
The film begins with a bang as a bomb blows a hole in the hull of the private plane carrying our protagonist, Anatoly “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, international arms merchant and shady financier, to his next destination. The title tells us it’s “1950: High Above the Balkan Flatland,” a Ruritania that Anderson has visited before, and as usual, someone is trying to assassinate Korda. This time his enemies almost succeed. His near-death experience unfolds through a series of flashbacks in The Phoenician Scheme, revealing a milky white afterlife where Korda stands accused of many misdeeds.
He awakens in this world, bloodied and bruised in a dried yellow cornfield that resembles the famous patch of farm where Cary Grant ducked from an aerial assailant in North by Northwest. The Phoenician Scheme is built in part from moments that recognize and transmogrify famous bits in cinema history. Is the champagne cocktail served to Korda in Marseille Bob’s, a nightclub where the band wears fezzes, an allusion to Casablanca?
Right, let’s not forget that The Phoenician Scheme has a plot. Korda’s nine sons are kept in a dormitory across the street from his palazzo, but all are young or incompetent, and he chooses to make his long-estranged daughter Liesel his executor, his confidant—to the extent that a man such as Korda can confide in anyone. Perhaps the fact that she’s a candidate nun gives this godless tycoon assurance? Dysfunctional families are a recurring theme for Anderson, especially rascally fathers.
And the Scheme? Korda is planning a massive development project in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Phoenicia, not the historic land now called Lebanon but an imaginary desert realm in need of a dam, an irrigation project and a railroad tunnel blasted through a mountainside. He speaks of an “indentured workforce” of locals who will do the heavy lifting, and funding arrangements built like a house of cards, ready to topple. Liesel maintains an undercurrent of criticism as the Scheme moves haltingly forward. She hopes to accomplish God’s work in the end, and perhaps her dream stands a ghost of a chance. Could Korda’s close encounter with death have triggered thoughts of redemption?
Mia Threapleton channels the Greta Garbo of Ninotchka with her stern, blank faced dismay at the goings on she encounters. Their improbable assistant, the nerdy entomologist Bjorn, is played by Michael Cera in the Gene Wilder mold. Benicio del Toro is the star and center of motion, wary eyed yet suffused with a narcissist’s self-confidence and lack of concern for bad outcomes.
As usual, Anderson’s latest project has a prestige patina and drew a full cast of recognizable supporting characters, including Scarlett Johansson as Korda’s distant cousin Hilda, Benedict Cumberbatch as the nefarious Uncle Nubar and Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as a pair of arrogant American businessmen, clutching a Coke bottle and a Hershey bar to their chests. Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe appear in the afterlife.
The Phoenician Scheme’s dialogue is snappy and occasionally funny. Without depending on CGI and with a relatively modest budget, Anderson has erected another daffy universe composed less from real life than from the reshapen images of reality remembered through the media of old movies, newspapers and news reels.
