‘Anderson fatigue’ be damned, I’m excited for The Phoenician Scheme

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

If we didn’t have Wes Anderson, we’d have to create him. And every entry from the auteur director is a “creation” in the fullest sense. Anderson’s milieu is among the most distinct in contemporary cinema — he of the twee, with a sad, side-eyed and wiseass nod to knowing tragedy in comedy.

Anderson’s oeuvre has been so informing to film-making culture — and wider culture, to boot — that we all know what it’s about: meticulous (borderline obsessive) design, immaculate scoring and set pieces that toy with mundanity to achieve exoticism. His films are so “Anderson” that the AAA-list ensembles that he conjures out of seeming pure will are almost an afterthought.

Haters gonna hate, but Anderson knows what he’s about, and that’s to be commended. Such is the case with his newest flick, The Phoenician Scheme.

Courtesy photo.

Disclosure: I have not seen this movie, but it’s opening Friday, May 30 in select theaters and nationwide Friday, June 6. I have, however, seen every other Wes Anderson movie since The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) right up to Asteroid City (2023), and will see this one at the first opportunity.

I enjoy swimming in Andersonian waters, and they’re always pretty much the same temperature with concomitant currents. That’s to say that, as a committed Anderson fan of more than 20 years, I am not unaffected by what many describe as “Wes Anderson fatigue.” The 56-year-old director’s vision is so singular and style so bespoke that it can become a little “much.” A less charitable summary might be that Anderson is the whitest, most upper-middle-class male filmmaker in the biz, and his predilections and obsessions speak to that viewership, of which I’m a part (other than the “upper” part of “middle-class”).

I feel this weariness with a lot of Anderson’s work. Despite about a half dozen viewings, Asteroid City’s charms continue to elude me, for instance.

Casting about for indications of how other Andersonophiles were thinking about The Phoenician Scheme, I ran across an incisive entry on the Reddit r/moviecritic thread.

User Crandin wrote that while being a self-described “Wes Anderson diehard” who (like me) sees every one of his films in the theater than rewatches them for years after, they have struggled with the director’s most recent efforts — Asteroid City and The French Dispatch in particular. (I had to force myself to fall in love with the latter, which I eventually did, though I’m still a Tenenbaums/Grand Budapest Hotel loyalist.)

As Crandin stated, Anderson’s best work goes “down smooth, like pure melted gold”; however, after having apparently viewed The Phoenician Scheme in an early screener, they’d “put it in between [Fantastic] Mr. Fox and Asteroid City.”

That’s damning with faint praise, despite George Clooney’s superb voice work as the eponymous Mr. Fox in the Roald Dahl-inspired stop-motion film adaptation.

The trailers for Phoenecian Scheme have hinted at a typical Anderson setup: A ludicrously rich, mysterious and idiosyncratic man has a plan to make himself richer with the titular “scheme” and, along the way, he enlists his daughter (a nun) to help him out through mobster-by-turns-paramilitary tactics.

There’s a lot of reference to hand grenades in the preview material, leavened by the usual Anderson panache, which ebert.com picked up on:

“[T]he latest from the beloved auteur feels like a lark — it’s one of his flat-out goofiest movies, filled with physical humor and sight gags — but he’s also playing with deeper themes like finding purpose in family instead of business and the way oligarchs can manipulate both.” 

However, “Buoyed by a traditionally spectacular ensemble, The Phoenician Scheme feels unlikely to be anyone’s favorite Wes Anderson flick. Still, it’s so easy to like that it’s equally difficult to hate it.”

The allusion to ensemble includes Benicio Del Toro — one of Anderson’s stable of actors — as the oligarchic patriarch Zsa-zsa Korda and Mia Threapleton (the nunnish daughter) who sets the plot in motion. Along the way, there are characters inhabited by the likes of Steve Park, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Michael Cera, Bryan Cranston, Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Bill Murray playing no less than God. 

Anderson’s casting reads like the front row of an especially fun-loving Academy Awards ceremony. No one in Hollywood gets to play with performers like those as if they’re favorite toys in a jewel box setting. 

Yet, early reviews are a little iffy (76% on Rotten Tomatoes), 3/5 stars from The Guardian, 3/4 stars from ebert.com, etc., but Redditor Crandin might be closest to the fanbase, writing: “[I]t’s straightforward and fun. Still, the reviews are coming in, and most of them put it pretty low. My guess is fatigue, because it doesn’t change the Wes formula enough to be ‘new,’ even if it would be a masterpiece to people unfamiliar with Wes’ work.”

Time will tell; but, for now, I’m scheming on a theater seat for this one.