The Phoenician Scheme

You shouldn’t need a film degree to enjoy a picture, but in the case of Wes Anderson’s latest, it might help: The Texas-born expat auteur mines a camera pan for a punchline (a camera pan!) and draws inspiration from Bergman, Hitchcock, Sturges, and the Archers for this international caper.

Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, an industrialist and arms dealer trying to land an ethically dubious deal involving a dam, a canal, a tunnel, and a half-dozen investors, all while dodging multiple assassination attempts, reckoning with his mortality, and reconnecting with estranged daughter Liesel (Threapleton), a young novitiate frankly appalled by her godless father.

The Phoenician Scheme is admirably silly stuff, scampering across the globe for star-packed vignettes. Everybody here came to play, and to a one they bend to Anderson’s distinct deadpan-comic delivery. They’re not just famous names (scan the credits: that’s a stacked lineup). They have interesting faces, too. Michael Cera in particular dazzles as an entomologist with an accent and mustache he might’ve lifted from an Ernst Lubitsch stock player; Cera and Threapleton, another pitch-perfect addition to Anderson’s ranks, are crackling together.

It sounds sneering to call The Phoenician Scheme a minor work, especially considering its major accomplishments in set and costume design, not to mention Anderson and editor Barney Pilling’s elegant hand with the breakneck pace and so much tightly controlled chaos. After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter.