May 2025

The Phoenician Scheme

In the spirit of the Oxford Word of the Year, I feel the pervasive phrase that's been haunting the lips of many a movie pundit would be ‘slop’: unchallenging, trivial fodder that simply loiters a cinema screen before gormless eyeballs. But the hard truth is, I’m just as susceptible to its docile allure, arguably when it creeps into the arthouse and independent scene. I may haughtily scoff and tut at Disney’s latest bastardisation of a childhood favourite (BRING BACK GAY PLEAKLEY), but then passively retreat to the routinely symmetrical sights and monotone babble in Wes Anderson’s newest exercise in copy/paste. What a hypocrite! I know it’s a running joke that Anderson is a bit trigger-happy with ‘ctrl C’, however I’ve always been a defender of his work, usually the intricacies behind the curtain of that auteur presentation. I unfavourably loved The French Dispatch; translating the form of a newspaper cinematically provided a confectious buffet of immense ambition. And even Asteroid City I enjoyed, with an intriguing hook of its stage-play framing device, and a multimedia close-encounter being a thing of magic. The Phoenician Scheme, on the contrary, feels like the bare minimum - it’s Andersonian in the most passable, superficial, inoffensive sense. 

Imagery of miniatures and doll-like containers have always been essential to Wes’ visual language. An opening shot of The Phoenician Scheme portrays an arrangement of precisely aligned boxes, then a recurrent checklist of lead Zsa-zsa Korda’s (Benicio del Toro) elaborate business expedition, all contained within a snugly compressed aspect ratio. This overwhelming sense of pedantic neatness, even for Anderson, seemingly eliminates any room for playful innovation or joyous whimsy - the compartmentalised narrative runs congruent beside the literally ‘square’ architectural motif to a disturbingly mechanical degree. I’ve never seen a Wes Anderson film that felt this much like a machine: a pristinely built, air-tight, impeccably polished machine, yes, but possessing an intangible void of a soul. There wasn’t an instance where I felt any sense of surprise or glee at something new - light exhales from the nose were my biggest emotional reaction. Michael Cera does attempt to inject some spice into the quadratic clockwork with his timid and bumbling Bjorn, but a funny accent amidst 100 minutes of tick-box, 'auto-pilot' discipline simply doesn't cut the mustard. 

The Phoenician Scheme is purely ‘Un Film de Wes Anderson’: nothing more, nothing less - a serviceable MacGuffin to solely elicit smugly acerbic chuckles from a sagely audience (and believe me, there was A LOT of that going on in my screening). Wes’ films were hugely formative to my teenage years, and if I had seen this at fifteen, I’m sure I would have loved it. To be clear, I’m uncertain if I would call The Phoenician Scheme traditionally ‘bad’ - but the fact that it arrives this far into Anderson’s nearly 30 year career just leaves me wondering what in the name of Bill Murray he has left up his corduroy sleeve?