Wes Anderson at his glorious best sends Benicio del Toro on an odyssey

Sydney Morning Herald

28-05-2025

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
★★★★
M. 101 minutes. In cinemas May 29
Wes Anderson's films can make you feel as if you've stumbled into the pages of a global encyclopaedia of perverse facts. Such is the weirdness of the worlds he constructs.
Sometimes he strays too far into the arcane and the laughs get lost in the confusion but his best work is so gloriously ridiculous that you can forgive him anything.
The Phoenician Scheme is in that category. Its deeply flawed hero, Anatole Korda (Benicio del Toro), otherwise known as 'Zsa-zsa', is an international industrialist masterminding a series of civil engineering projects in the fictional nation of Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia and he's on an odyssey, travelling around the country to meet his various business partners and try to re-negotiate the agreements he's made with them.
In the madness that Anderson whips up along the way, there are inevitable reminders of Trump's tariffs and the art of the deal, although the similarities end there. Unlike Trump, Korda is a reader with interests ranging from the artistic to the entomological. Depictions of Blasphemy in Gouache and Fleas of the Americas are just two the book titles you can spot while studying the furnishings which make up his world. As always, Anderson has been very thorough with the details and the seductively photogenic eccentricities of the production design are high on the list of the film's attractions. He's even managed to secure a real Renoir and a Magritte to decorate the background.
Anderson has said that Korda himself is a composite of the most flamboyant magnates of the post-war years. Onassis, Niarchos, Agnelli and the Gulbenkian family all went into the mix and del Toro, clearly inspired by this, strides through the action with confidence impervious to anyone else's idea of logic or reason. He smokes very fat cigars and his face still bears the cuts and bruises sustained during the latest of the assassination attempts against him.
Much more serious than the others, this near-death experience has got him thinking about his legacy and he's summoned his only daughter, Liesl, whom he hasn't seen in six years, to tell her that she's going to inherit everything.
She's played by Mia Threapleton, who exhibits the same air of authority that we're used to seeing in her mother, Kate Winslet's performances, and she's less than pleased by her father's offer. She's about to become a nun and she's doesn't think God would approve of Korda's many sins against the underprivileged poor. Nonetheless, she finally agrees to accompany him on his tour, along with Michael Cera as Bjorn, his new administrative assistant, and from this point, the cast rapidly expands with Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston presenting Korda's first challenge as a couple of railroad tycoons using entertainingly unorthodox means to get the better of him.