The Phoenician Scheme: Wes Anderson Strips His Style Back to Basics

Since the mid 90s, filmmaker Wes Anderson has delivered an instantly recognizable style few artists have these days. There are coffee table books, social media pages, and even AI slop associated to his sensibilities. As his profile has grown, so has the scale of his projects. From the symmetrical campus of Rushmore to the stop-motion sushi preparation sequence in Isle of Dogs, his increasingly elaborate, yet perhaps distancing, feats of film and design are nothing short of remarkable. With his most recent film The Phoenician Scheme starring Benicio del Toro, however, it feels as if Anderson has taken all he has learned while becoming such an empowered filmmaker to his most streamlined feature film in almost a decade. 

Something changed after the closest thing he has had to a mainstream breakthrough, The Grand Budapest Hotel. The thrilling comedy was his first distinct period piece and felt more like a world completely its own rather than a manicured interpretation of our own. While It features a sprawling cast of side characters played by known actors such as Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton, the story centers around the relationships between its three leads played by Ralph Fiennes and up-and-comers (at the time) Tony Revolori and Saoirse Ronan as they move around the winding mystery. It feels as if Andseron has balanced his penchant for energised storybook adventure with his deadpan yet tender dramedy as satisfyingly as one of his signature shots. His following feature works, however, feel like he continued to grow within his style while not necessarily transcending it. 

Isle of Dogs features some of the most jaw-dropping stop motion animation ever put to film. The aforementioned sushi preparation scene alone is proof of what the animation medium can achieve from a technical perspective. Narratively, however, Anderson seems too eager to jump around a myriad of subplots injecting stylistic hats upon hats that distance us from the soul of the story. Rather than adding subtitles to the Japanese dialogue, he chooses to either leave us in the dark about what the characters are saying or have english-speaking ones talk over them. The romance between Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and Lucinda (Frances McDormand) in the middle segment of The French Dispatch feels stifled by the overbearing voice-over narration that also flattens the political aspects of the piece. Asteroid City has moments of true brilliance stacked between an endless cascade of gorgeous imagery and formalist story structure. The increasing profile of the actors he casts has also begun to make his worlds feel a bit too artificial. Stars like Margot Robbey will appear for one scene, not allowing the viewer to look past the fact that one of the most famous actors in the world just appeared an hour and a half into the film. This is not to say all three of these films fail at what they’re going for or have nothing new to offer, a new Wes Anderson film brings so much to the table that is worth seeing on the big screen. However, the stylistic density of both his visual and narrative form was starting to feel more like Anderson was indulging more than expressing. 

With almost thirty years under his belt, and a level of creative freedom few have achieved, Wes Anderson finally seems comfortable distilling his narrative approach. On The Phoenician Scheme, he puts together his most streamlined work. The story follows infamous businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) as he appoints his estranged daughter Lielsa (Mia Threapleton), an aspiring nun, as the sole heir of his estate in an attempt to salvage their relationship and perhaps his soul. She starts to learn the inner workings of his business dealings when they start to become the target of assasination and sabotage attempts from government agencies and rival tycoons. Structured in chapters represented by shoeboxes that contain each step of Korda’s plan, the film maintains Anderson’s penchant for diorama-like framing while progressing linearly along with our two leads. We still meet an ensemble of side characters but, much like in Grand Budapest, they all function in contrast with the protagonists, giving us another side of the coin and showing us how the father-daughter duo work in different situations. 

Stylistically, Anderson takes the scale he can achieve in this later period and channels it in service of the “smaller” story he’s telling us. The miniatures appear within the story, the extravagant props are gifted between characters, the sumptuous sets are motivated by the characterization, the voice over is a diegetic news broadcast. By working these formal choices into the script, Anderson brings us into this zany world rather than alienating with one diorama after another. This distillation has also allowed him to create something new that fuses the best qualities of past works. The Phoenician Scheme contains the family tensions of something like The Royal Tenenbaums and injects that madhat violence and antics of his stop-motion masterpiece Fantastic Mr. Fox. As a matter of fact, this might be Anderson's most violent live-action film to date, yet he has mastered this cartoony tone to the point where the film doesn’t lose its levity amidst the plane crashes and gunfire. 

This is not to say that this is Anderson’s best film since Grand Budapest, however, it is certainly his most welcoming. In a cinematic landscape where most artists are forced to constantly justify why they should be given the right to keep creating (see all the pocket watching around the success of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners), it should be celebrated that someone like Anderson gets to keep making work his way. While some of his recent films have gotten denser and perhaps harder to dive into, take this most recent romp as a reason to dive in.