How Wes Anderson Finally Lost Me
The American auteur’s The Phoenician Scheme falls flat.
There aren’t 10 people in the big Regal theater outside Richmond, Virginia on opening night of Wes Anderson’s newest film, the Phoenician Scheme.
I arrive 15 minutes late with the hope of skipping what has become an endless procession of trailers before the feature but am still forced to sit through several previews. “A director of Fargo” reads the animated text before the trailer for Honey Don’t!, a “lesbian B-movie” penned and directed by Ethan Coen, sans Joel. The preview looks exactly as you might expect a Coen film to look—a genre-blending, iconic mix of western noir and cynical comedy. Though that may sound intriguing to fans of the Coens, the trailer reads and feels like the paint-by-numbers procedure it certainly is, a most eloquent warning for what lies ahead in today’s viewing of Anderson’s latest jaunt.
Anderson’s work holds a special place in my heart. As a young, intrepid film student, it was Anderson, more so than Truffaut or Tarkovsky, who inspired in me a deep desire to pursue studies in the cinematic arts. The offbeat humor of early efforts Bottle Rocket and Rushmore complemented by the visual panache and sonic style of the Royal Tenenbaums and the Life Aquatic jolted Anderson to the forefront of American cinema. In a sea of Marvels, there was Anderson and Indian Paintbrush, the little film studio that could, turning out deadpan meta-fictions worth the price of admission.
And though I often felt Anderson had lost a step somewhere along the way, one could still quite enjoy the Houston filmmaker’s mid-career arc. The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, and the Grand Budapest Hotel all possess a beating heart, each teeming with bittersweet and tender moments that overpower the pure whimsy of Anderson’s fantastical mind.
But it’s been Anderson’s late career where the American auteur has firmly lost this fan. The French Dispatch was a derivative, lifeless mess. Flat, substanceless, and self-serving. A navel-gazing film for Godard fans, allegedly. His next, Asteroid City, fared no better in my estimation. Terribly disjointed in narrative and sporting a pastel palette so overexposed it threatens to burn the viewer’s retina, I walked out of the theater wondering whether I’d pay top dollar to see another tepid entry into Anderson’s diary of the surreal.
Yet there I was on Thursday. Opening night. Your humble correspondent and nine other cinephiles eager to give Anderson’s goofy, slapstick world another chance. From the moment the film began, however, I found problems. The film follows Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio Del Toro, a ruthless, wealthy industrialist who attempts to broker a series of deals with a network of eccentric financiers to fund a mining operation. All the while, Korda is hunted by a team of unnamed assassins who attempt, again and again without success, to kill the unkillable man.
Along for the ride is Korda’s estranged daughter, Liesl, a questioning nun who seeks a disjointed and emotionless reconciliation with her stoic father. It’s the biggest role yet in 24-year-old Mia Threapleton’s career, and she fits right in as another dispassionate setpiece in one of Anderson’s quirky vignettes.
The Arrested Development star Michael Cera attempts to breathe some life into the film, playing the role of Bjørn Lund, a Norwegian entomologist tasked with teaching Korda about the world of bugs. But Cera’s Scandinavian accent is off-putting, strange for strangeness’s sake. When it is revealed that Lund is actually an American spy and Cera drops the unpleasant accent, he finds a few humorous beats scattered throughout a graveyard of unfunny material.
As with much of Anderson’s filmography, the picture is billed as a “dark comedy.” But no one inside the Regal theater on Thursday was laughing. Through long stretches of the film, and in spots where the cast openly reached for humor, the theater remained silent. After all, what’s funny about rootless, characterless characters without heart? Those effervescent, electric, and heartbreaking moments that Gene Hackman, the Wilson brothers, and Jason Schwartzman delivered in the early stages of Anderson’s career are gone. Now there are only faceless, shapeless puppets being maneuvered in Anderson’s boring, boring game.
The opening scene of the film really says it all. Korda sits in a perfectly lit, immaculately organized private plane made to look like the ornate insides of the Venice Simplon-Orient Express. His administrative assistant, sitting near the back of the plane, suddenly explodes, his body ripped in two. Blood splatters the carefully curated wallpaper of the set. In archetypal Anderson fashion, Del Toro barely moves a muscle, only lifting the brow above his left eye in response. He feels nothing. And watching the scene, I, too, felt nothing. But that’s the point of this era of Anderson, isn’t it? To feel nothing. Well I felt it: nothing.
One senses that Anderson believes there is some appeal to this level of bizarre anti-humanity, but it’s frankly grating. When the film premiered at Cannes in May, it received the anticipated standing ovation but was also met with audible derision from those parts of the audience, who, like me, have grown tired of the trick.
Does the film look good? It looks spectacular. The French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel is brilliant in his role. Using varying aspect ratios and film stocks, Delbonnel crafts a look that is unique and unparalleled. His camera glides and swirls over meticulously crafted interiors, symmetrical compositions, rigid facial profiles, and dramatic architectures.
To add to the film’s striking visual style, collectors loaned Anderson real masterpiece paintings by legendary artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and René Magritte. The Hamburger Kunsthalle also provided a selection of pieces that hang idly in the background of the set designer Anna Pinnock’s pristine tableaus. Though the film and its sets are a spectacle to behold, I can’t help but wonder whether the whole taxing affair wouldn’t be better suited inside an art gallery in Tribeca instead of a popcorn-littered movie theater.
As the Phoenician Scheme passed the hour mark, I wondered for whom this film is, exactly. The high art crowd can’t sincerely take this charade seriously. It’s pure ego-stroking. Perhaps that is the film’s appeal, narcissism. But, for me, who found sincerity among the noble aspirations of Anderson’s early work, the Scheme reminds me of a deliberate, hamfisted film-school exercise that would never find funding if not for the name on the marquee. It is clear that this film was a lot of fun for everyone who made it—the actors, the set designers, the cameramen. The viewing audience be damned.
I resent the crispness of Anderson’s new frame. His manufactured worlds, his rote miniatures, are so very concerned with the elevated aesthetics of refinement that his films are now completely devoid of the stuff of life. It’s all become so reflexive, tedious, and cute that the work borders on self-parody, at times reading like an SNL skit poking fun at the Houston filmmaker.
As I leave the theater underwhelmed, three words echo in my head: overwrought, overbought, and overcooked. Over being the key element here. I’m over it: the grand, in-your-face design therapy without rhyme or reason. The audacious costuming that hangs lifelessly on characterless, empty figures. A private circus for kings and queens where everyone has forgotten how to smile. That’s the new Anderson—a filmmaker whose only interest appears to be exaggerated insincerity.
We’ll always have Royal and Zissou. But as for Zsa-zsa Korda? That’s where Anderson lost me.
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