An exploding torso sucked out of an aeroplane; communist guerrillas roaming the jungle; plus a slippery tycoon, dagger-wielding nun and Norwegian entomologist globetrotting from one exotic misadventure to the next: it’s safe to say Wes Anderson’s latest rectilinear journey is his most thrilling and hare-brained since The Grand Budapest Hotel.
If Zsa-Zsa Korda’s boxy, corduroy-textured world were a novella, it would most resemble Candide. Chaos, coincidence and a breadcrumb trail of bodies follow the cartoonishly wealthy mogul around like a bad smell. That, and several crates of grenades stowed on his private plane, which are handed out to acquaintances like vol-au-vents. More explicitly, there’s a villainous, Bondian absurdity leaking from Korda’s slicked-back hair and pinstripe suit: a will for world domination where finagling, backstabbing, twisting arms in high places and evading weekly assassination attempts is the order of the day.
Wes Anderson, is that you?
By this point, you may be wondering if you’re reading the right review. Wes Anderson and ‘will to power’ doesn’t sound like a familiar concoction, or perhaps an agreeable one to diehard fans. But it’s the director’s veering away from his beloved tragicomedy style – a powerful tool used throughout Anderson’s best films to date – that enables The Phoenician Scheme to live a little: to swap childlike loneliness for high stakes gambits; and cutesy, bourgeois family dysfunction for jungles, marauders and mega infrastructures in the Near East.
Importantly, it enables the eternally cool Benicio del Toro (playing Korda) to limp from a plane crash and directly into the frame of a live news broadcast whilst pushing a vestigial organ back into place. Try that one for size, Steve Zissou.
Get Korda
So who’s trying to get the man who can’t be got? The possibilities are near endless. There’s a whole gamut of assassins and button men who were previously on Korda’s payroll, there’s the Norwegian entomologist, and Korda’s family tutor Bjorn (played by the hilariously gauche Michael Cera, whose janky accent may hide a more secretive agenda). And there’s a cabal of shadowy businessmen led by Rupert Friend, who resemble different shades of Robert McNamara, who are plotting to end the slippery tycoon’s industrial reign by challenging the price of ‘bashable rivets’.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s Korda’s estranged daughter Liesel (Mia Threapleton), a soon-to-be sister of the cloth, first introduced off the back of a million-dollar question: did the tycoon kill her mother? Anything is possible in this mad dog world.
Scheming and swindling
And so follows Korda’s ‘Phoenician Scheme’: a chaotic scramble across skies, jungle floors and sumptuous lounges to build mega projects in the desert and outfox the snakes in the grass. Here, anyone is fair game – industrialists, black marketeers, even a desert population that Korda proposes to enslave and starve. Swindling and conniving are the weapons of choice. Hell, the tycoon onboards a sea captain financier by refusing to put the pin back on a grenade.
But as thrilling as the plot is, the film is at its best when we get to hang out with the characters, see them trade implausibly direct confessionals or contemplate whether there’s yet another bomb on board their plane. Despite surviving six crashes in all, Korda always feels “perfectly safe”. Or when we’re centre-court in a basketball match, where Zsa-Zsa and Prince Farouk (played with regal charm by Riz Ahmed) take on two brotherly nabobs (Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks) in a hilariously one-sided game of winner-takes-all. It’s all so delightfully laidback: machine gun-equipped trains and servants wait in stasis while four impossibly rich men decide their fortune over a game that could be played outside a garage.
Final thoughts
Barmy is the only word applicable here, and that’s the remarkable power of Anderson’s picture: cartoonish misadventure and international intrigue integrated with the gawky, self-conscious world we’ve come to know and love from the director’s singular creations. We become an additional member of this merry band of moguls. And if you haven’t met them yet, you should – they’re quite a laugh.
