Wes Anderson's "Phoenician Scheme" will be screened at the Little Art Theater this weekend. (Image: TPS Productions, Focus Features via AP)
Film Review | New schemes from the king of twee
- Published: June 13, 2025
I’m susceptible to no greater siren song than seeing the title of a new Wes Anderson flick sunbathing on the Little Art marquee — I’m crashing into the front row the first chance I get.
Top to bottom, his filmography just delights me, and always has — except maybe those few self-conscious years when I shunned my natural, so-called hipster impulses. I was a fool; life’s too short to deny the heart what it wants.
The dollhouse worlds Anderson builds are stunning time and time again. They’re brushed in technicolor vibrancy — never a quirky prop out of place — and populated by his increasingly famous playthings, whose breakneck repartee confounds as much as it tickles. Anderson’s newest plot, “The Phoenician Scheme,” stays on brand in all its charming twee.
For the second week in a row, “The Phoenician Scheme” continues its run at the Little Art this weekend, and if you’re at all starved for symmetrical eye candy and over-the-top assassination attempts, buy the ticket and take the ride.
“The Phoenician Scheme” centers around globetrotting capitalist and deadpan tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) who, despite his enemies’ best shots, just can’t seem to die. Still, after surviving his sixth plane crash, Korda knows he needs an heir — just in case. His estranged and only daughter, a young woman of the cloth named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), seems like a better fit than any of Korda’s nine sons, especially the one with a bow and arrow.
So, Korda whisks his nun-of-a-daughter around the world to show her the family business, specifically having her shadow him as he brokers a huge business deal — the “scheme” in question — with Arabian princes, sleazy club owners, American entrepreneurs and others. The casting here is nothing short of outrageous. Picture Richard Ayoade as a militant Marxist-Leninist, Bryan Cranston tearing up a basketball court, and perhaps not unsurprising for an Anderson flick, Bill Murray as the most powerful being in the universe.
To hell with them: Michael Cera really stole the show. He plays a biologist with a penchant for bringing praying mantises to dinner, and spends a solid amount of time courting the chaste Liesl. To quote a meme my wife shared with me: “Wes Anderson casting Michael Cera must have felt like a caveman discovering fire.” Suffice it to say, the guy fits in pretty well. Perhaps an heir ascendant to Anderson’s future schemes?
What “The Phoenician Scheme” has in famous faces and visual grandeur, it does admittedly lack in intimacy. Aside from del Toro boring holes into the camera, frame after frame, likely contemplating his black-and-white afterlife — there, shackled to chains rather than wealth — I never felt as if I got much of a glimpse into the complicated interior worlds of the characters.
Anderson didn’t pop the hood on his cast like he has in the past. Think: Steve Zissou telling us about his boat, the brothers in “Darjeeling Limited” reconciling after their father’s death, Zero seeing nothing but perfection in Agatha’s scarred face as carnival lights spun and blurred behind her in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Remember what it was like to fall in love? To lose a parent?
In essence, “The Phoenician Scheme” wasn’t quite as emotionally evocative as what came before. Maybe that’s fine. Not every painting in the museum needs to move. We can still admire the textures, the careful brushstrokes, the ornate frame, the ironically detached subject staring blankly beyond the foreground.
Perhaps “The Phoenician Scheme” was Anderson’s way of mirroring his Korda’s dogged rebellion against death or irrelevance. Rather than a cabal of invested financiers, the director wrangled all the celebrities he could to pull off the impossible: not a scheme to reconnect with a young nun, but to somehow top his past successes with more extravagance than ever before.
Whether Anderson pulled off his latest box-office heist successfully, “The Phoenician Scheme” is worth seeing — if anything, just to give your eyes something to relish, and your funny bone some exercise.
“The Phoenician Scheme” will be screened at the Little Art Theatre, 247 Xenia Ave. in Yellow Springs, at various times Friday–Sunday, June 13–15. For tickets and more information, go to littleart.com.
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