It might sound strange to describe a Wes Anderson film as the summer’s most delightful action-comedy, but “The Phoenician Scheme” is a cockamamie lark full of silly stunts, international intrigue and a daredevil anti-hero cheating death at every turn. When it comes to narrowly escaping mid-air mishaps, Tom Cruise has got nothing on Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, the shady industrialist we meet in the process of surviving his sixth plane crash. Played with rakish charm by Benicio Del Toro, the wheeler-dealer is a magnet for assassination attempts. It seems like everywhere Korda goes, there’s somebody trying to kill him. Usually for pretty good reasons. He’s one of those ethically murky, mid-century moguls who made his fortune profiteering off foreign wars and slave labor, never giving a thought to the consequences of his actions, until recently.
That last near-miss really rattled him. Korda had a vision of himself arriving at the pearly gates — a black-and-white afterlife staffed by Wes Anderson stock company regulars ready to pass a judgment that he knows won’t be in his favor. Any good businessman is always angling for better outcomes, so Korda decides to shake things up a bit. He’s got a gaggle of nine interchangeable sons he’s been breeding as backup heirs, but instead decides to pull his estranged only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), out of the convent and appoints her as his successor, on a trial basis, of course. Their goal is to complete the scheme from which the film takes its title, a massive, graft-infested Middle Eastern infrastructure project for which Korda has come up a smidge short on the financing. How short?
“Everything we have,” he explains. “Plus a little more.”
What follows is an action-packed, globe-trotting romp with the tycoon and his sullen daughter traveling the world, appealing to a star-studded rogues’ gallery of sketchy investors while dodging assassins’ bullets and CIA sabotage. They’re accompanied by Michael Cera as a Swedish entomologist first hired to be a tutor for Korda’s boys but promoted to his personal valet after the old one gets blown up. It seems insane that this is Cera’s first appearance in a Wes Anderson film, like when Tom Waits showed up in the Coen brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” after you just assumed they’d already been working together for decades.
Cera runs away with “The Phoenician Scheme,” giving a rubber-limbed performance with a goofball accent and incongruous confidence to rival his Wally Brando on “Twin Peaks.” The nerdy bugman fancies himself a libertine and has designs on his boss’ daughter. Some of the film’s biggest laughs lie in his attempts to pry the pious Liesl out of her habit. Threapleton, in her first major movie role, is excellent as the chilly novitiate slowly thawing to her bad dad and this sorry suitor. (From certain angles, she looks uncannily like her mom, Kate Winslet, and I note with a shudder that Threapleton is already a year older than her mother was when she made “Titanic,” just in case we Gen Xers needed another sign of our encroaching decrepitude.)
Del Toro is almost too perfect as Korda, a role that Anderson didn’t write for the actor so much as he’s tailored it like a bespoke suit. Del Toro was born at the exact wrong time for our square, superhero era — just think of what Hollywood would have done with him in the 1940s — and he’s such a slyly funny screen presence that watching him always feels like you and he are getting away with something together. Not since Robert Mitchum has a movie star made seediness so magnetic. His best roles take advantage of the fact that you’re never really sure where Del Toro stands, but you’re willing to follow him anywhere.
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Korda is the latest of Anderson’s scoundrel patriarchs — gruff and endearingly full of B.S. like Royal Tenenbaum or the fantastic Mr. Fox. The filmmaker claims that a lot of the character’s idiosyncrasies were inspired by his own father-in-law, Fouad Malouf, to whom the movie is touchingly dedicated. But we shouldn’t discount the input of co-writer Roman Coppola, who knows a thing or two about a larger-than-life father gambling all they have and a little more on quixotic dream projects. Del Toro is hilarious when revealing slight cracks in the character’s implacable confidence, like an increasingly nervous hitch in his voice as he repeats Korda’s constant catch-phrase, “Myself, I feel quite safe.”
As Anderson’s movies have grown more elaborately stagebound and contraption-like, leaning into his artificial dollhouse aesthetic and blurring the lines between live-action and stop-motion animation, their emotional arcs have become more muted and compressed into micro-gestures. Gone are the jangly, 1960s needle-drops that brought the characters’ feelings flooding to the surface, and the compact busyness of all that visual bric-a-brac can occasionally overwhelm everything else. His actors are synced to the same metronomic delivery, so it’s easy to sometimes miss the depths that are roiling beneath these intricately detailed surfaces. (This is why the first time I saw “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” I thought it was one of the most obnoxious movies I had ever seen, and now I find it so achingly sad that some scenes are difficult to watch.)
Anderson’s last film, “Asteroid City,” rather brilliantly unlocked his whole process for me. The movie positioned the scientific method and Method acting as two sides of the same coin, seeing both the arts and sciences as humanity’s ways of trying to quantify experiences and emotions that are beyond our comprehension, all of us making our own little charts and checklists and building our own dollhouses and stages while ultimately conceding that we haven’t quite figured out the math or the point of the play just yet. It helped me understand that this director’s oft-parodied stylistic quirks aren’t just hipster affectations, but rather a language of expression all their own. Even if that style can grow tiresome at times (here’s looking at you, “The French Dispatch”), I believe him when he says he wouldn’t know how to make a movie any other way.
“The Phoenician Scheme” isn’t nearly as heady or philosophical as “Asteroid City,” missing the usual Anderson undercurrents of grief and melancholy. The movie is more gag-based than anything he’s done in ages, with an early bit involving a plane’s ejector seat so exquisitely timed that it caused me to make a spectacle of myself at the press screening. But emerging from beneath the avalanche of pratfalls and minutiae is an affecting father-daughter relationship in which these two come to realize they’re more alike than they’d first imagined. Threapleton’s Liesl, with her bold eye shadow and penchant for fancy things, might be just a little too venal for the nunnery, and maybe her old man isn’t such a heartless bastard after all?
After the breakneck pace and frantic buzzing about of the previous 90-odd minutes, the film’s final scene is surprisingly moving in its grace and simplicity. Could such a vulgar, obscenely wealthy man given to grandiose, ego-flattering follies really find contentment in small acts of service and the betterment of others? Unfortunately, I fear this is a fantasy we can only find at the movies.
“The Phoenician Scheme” is now in theaters.