The Phoenician Scheme plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
Here’s the trailer:
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If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: In 1950 the very wealthy, internationally-known industrialist/arms dealer, Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), plans a major revitalization of Phoenicia to become a tourist attraction, the remodeling to be done by slave labor, even as a consortium of various nations’ representatives, led by U.S.A.’s Excalibur (Rupert Friend), makes plans to undercut his unethical practices, maybe even kill him. It seems that second option may already be in place as the first scene in this film is a planned crash of his private jet which he somehow survives (not the first time; he’s overcome several such near-tragedies previously) leading to the first of several cutaways to the afterlife (presented in black & white) where in different encounters he meets his grandmother (Carmen Maja Antoni), who doesn’t even know him; his lawyer (Willem Dafoe), defending his life’s actions; his former 3 wives, mainly the first one (Charlotte Gainsbourg); and then God (Bill Murray).
In addition to the Phoenicia plan Zsa-Zsa also meets with his young-adult daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who’s about to take her vows as a nun, after having had little contact with Dad since he sent her away at age 5 (he also has 9 younger sons from the various wives [some may be adopted if I followed the dialogue correctly]); she wants no part of him as she believes he killed her mother (rumor has it he killed all of those previous spouses), but he denies ever having killed anyone (although he admits he’s hired assassins to do some killing for him), claims her Mom’s killer is his half-brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who was having an affair with Liesl’s mother so Zsa-Zsa made the false claim she was in another affair with Nubar’s assistant, leading him to kill both of them (in one of those afterlife interludes she tells Zsa-Zsa he’s not Liesl’s father, leading him to assume Nubar is). Zsa-Zsa wants Liesl to forgo the nunnery, take over his businesses, become his sole heir (he has no interest in his sons, was cut out of his own father’s will when he was a boy as part of his miserable childhood). She agrees to consider it on a trial basis but insists the boys come to live in Zsa-Zsa’s mansion while the supposed slaves for the project will get some sort of a wage.
Things get complicated for Zsa-Zsa, though, as cost overruns for the Phoenicia remodeling force him (traveling on another of his private jets with Liesl, further accompanied by his Swedish administrative assistant/entomology teacher, Bjørn [Michael Cera]) to seek out his co-investors Californians Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), French nightclub owner Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), East Coast businessman Marty (Jeffrey Wright), getting each of them to increase their contributions but it’s still not enough to cover the rising costs. When he tells Liesl about the lie that led to Mom’s death, she’s furious but agrees to keep working with him to bring down Nubar (which is difficultly-problematic as he’s also an investor in the Phoenician scheme, his funds needed to balance the overruns because Zsa-Zsa’s attempt to get money by proposing to his second cousin, Hilda [Scarlett Johansson] gets a yes to their marriage, a no to giving him any cash).
On their way home Zsa-Zsa’s plane is destroyed again, with Korda, Liesl, and Bjørn surviving, the latter revealing he’s actually from the CIA (and Delaware), but he’s switching sides because he’s now in love with Liesl; however, she’s had enough of all this foolishness, intends to take her vows until she’s dismissed by her Mother Superior (Hope Davis) as not being fit for the religious life. ⇒So she accompanies Korda and Bjørn to a major presentation of Zsa-Zsa’s plans for Phoenicia where Nubar shows up, says he’s withdrawing his cash from the project, denies killing Liesl’s Mom, admits he’s the one behind the death attempts on Zsa-Zsa, then the (sorta) siblings fight with Nubar ending up as the one expired. As this all finishes, Korda converts to Catholicism, pays the Phoenician project workers in the process losing his fortune after which he and Liesl run a small bistro, Hilda has her brief marriage to Zsa-Zsa annulled, gives his ring to Bjørn who successfully proposes to Liesl.⇐
SO WHAT? While I’ve had less-than-anticipated pleasure in 3 of my last 4 reviews (Sinners, The Accountant 2, Heads of State)—with only Eephus delivering what I’d hoped for—my no-pushover wife, Nina (who also liked Eephus, but maybe that’s because we’re both baseball fans, readying ourselves for the annual MLB All-Star Game even as I’m typing this, with our “hometown” [West Sacramento] Athletics’ rookie shortstop, Jacob Wilson, voted onto the starting American League team), being so put off with the violence in those first 3 noted just above that she left 2 of them before the final scenes were done (she stayed through all of Heads of State, seemingly because the killing depictions were barely-bloody PG-13 considerations rather than R gore). So, this week I tried to find something not so violent (although planes do crash, but with little deaths involved; the climatic fight between Zsa-Zsa and Nubar gets a bit rough, though it feels a bit to me as if it were a comic staging of Hamlet [William Shakespeare, c. 1600] with the duel between the Prince of Denmark and Laertes done here more for laughs than the resulting tragic deaths in the play), which worked out OK; however, the plot got so confusing she gave up on it anyway (admittedly, she wasn’t feeling that well on the night we watched it due to extreme heat in our area, wildfires smoke north of us that day which took its toll on her mysteriously-weakened lungs), so I’m still hoping to find something more successful for both of us when this weekend’s viewing rolls around. Wish me luck!
Still, note this film's somewhat tricky to follow due to the abundance of characters, the plethora of short scenes whisking you away from one encounter just as you’re about to make sense of it to something else entirely, not to mention the cutaways to the afterlife where Zsa-Zsa gets little of use except how his life could have been so much better. Overall, though, if you just marginally follow along with this typical Wes Anderson absurdity, the enjoyment of seeing some familiar faces in short bursts, the manner in which elusive del Toro and perpetually-frustrated Threapleton keep command of their roles (even if you’re not fully sure what their motives are), and the evolution of Cera’s character from quiet background guy (who’s barely in the frame in some shots) to a more fully-emphatic presence should be enough to make this worth the rental investment even if it’s not among the very top echelon of Anderson’s work (which for me would include Rushmore [1988], The Royal Tenenbaums [2002], The Grand Budapest Hotel [2014; sorry about my horrible layout here, I’ve tried to improve on that over the years since 2011], and Asteroid City [2023]), but it still has the standard Anderson off-beat visual compositions along with the lavish color schemes in his imagery.
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: You might assume there’s some intended current political commentary in this film in that the protagonist is a devious billionaire who’s known for shady business deals plus self-aggrandizement (he’s also had 3 wives) who proposed remaking Phoenicia into something along the lines of an eastern Mediterranean Riviera (much as Donald Trump, whose famous book should probably be called The Art of the Swindle, proposed such a makeover for Gaza—after all the inhabitants had been moved out, of course), yet Anderson says he wrote this in 2023 so the resemblances to current events may not fully be as contemporary as they might seem, especially because he says this story’s an exaggerated tribute to his deceased father-in-law Lebanese engineer Fouad Malouf, to whom this film is dedicated, even though it’s difficult to explain Korda plans to revive Phoenicia as the ancient culture of that name—located in the eastern Mediterranean, in areas now Lebanon and Syria, then established trade routes through North Africa to Spain—ended just a few decades before the birth of Christ. Yet, this is fiction after all, so don't fret.
You might also be a bit confused as to who killed Liesl’s mother in that both Korda brothers deny they did it. If you can put this collection of such weighty concerns aside, though, I think you’d find some enjoyable elements of The Phoenician Scheme even though much of it doesn’t make a lot of sense (for me, a good many scenes seem to have been thought up just for their silliness without having to be tied too tightly to an ongoingly-coherent narrative). It opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theatres on May 30, 2025, can still be found in 205 of them, has pulled in $19.1 million so far ($37.4 million globally), with decent CCAL support: Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 78%, Metacritic at a surprisingly-close 70%. U.K.s Robbie Collin in The Telegraph is especially enthusiastic, saying: “His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them. […] As the caper crashes by at breakneck speed, Anderson seems to be asking you to simultaneously sit up straight and bask at a let-it-wash-over-you angle – I often felt as if I was watching the film twice at once.” Yet, Odie Henderson of The Boston Globe begs to differ: “After watching the worst Anderson movie yet, I was envious of the guy who blew up [in the first scene]; he got to leave after only two minutes of this wretched comedy, the title of which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel adaptation. […] It’s a well-known fact that I am not a fan of Wes Anderson’s movies. I find them repetitive, relentlessly twee, and joyless, with actors delivering stilted dialogue as if they were talking robots whose batteries were about to die.” Well, you certainly can’t please all of the people all of the time, can you?
But, if The Phoenician Scheme appeals to you in any manner you might find one of those remaining theaters or you can turn to streaming where It rents for $19.99 from Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV+ among other seeming options. Or, if you just want some weirdness delivered in about 100 fewer minutes how about listening to my closing device of a Musical Metaphor that’s this time also an attack on narrative stability, The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” (on their 1967 Magical Mystery Tour album) which you can easily access at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og-yjQGzIS8&list= RDOg-yjQGzIS8&start_radio=1, a video from their film of the same name as the album (also 1967, more or less directed by those Fab Four guys) where John Lennon was amused by people trying to interpret his lyrics so he gave them something to ponder for days on end (sound quality's low on this clip so, if you like, here's just the recording). There’s lots to cite alluding to surrealism here so I’ll just use these lines: “Semolina pilchards / Climbing up the Eiffel Tower / Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna / Man, you should have seen them / Kicking Edgar Allan Poe” (truthful admission: for years when I hear them sing “Everybody’s got one” I could have sworn it was “Everybody’s cross-eyed,” making me as confused as some of Lennon’s analysts; I also didn’t know that the dialogue at the end is taken from Shakespeare’s King Lear [1606] arbitrarily recorded by Lennon off a radio broadcast). To finish: Wanna be in a Wes Anderson film? Maybe you could be, just like this guy.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
IMDb's Five Things to Watch on the Week of 7/13/2025; Current popular streaming on Netflix.
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