Review: The Phonecian Scheme (2025)
With 2023’s Asteroid City, Wes Anderson fully waded into political terrain for the first time in his thirty-year career, offering up a COVID deathblow couched in his endlessly obsessive anti-tweeness. But the ageing hipster knives have long been out for Anderson–the allegations of one-trick ponyism that land with all the heft of someone calling Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck.”
As Anderson’s most insufferably pompous first generation fans ungracefully enter middle age, they’ve aimed their ire at the director they loved, not because he’s ever actually fallen into decline, but because they never reached the rarefied indie echelons to which they felt entitled before a dearth of talent and their fealty to designer politics ravaged their worlds.
Rather than offer up red meat for the base, Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, dares a certain subset of its audience to dismiss it. As the prickly billionaire Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) enlists his estranged novitiate daughter (Mia Threapleton) to pull off a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project, Anderson navigates the pitfalls of unequivocal success and those that base their entire identities on hindering it. Addressing depictions of his indie excess as a distraction, Anderson has bent the Great Man movie toward his own style resulting in a film both slyly autobiographical and in line with the current sociopolitical climate.
As expected, Anderson trots out an enviable ensemble of stalwarts like Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Wright, and Scarlett Johansson as well as newish collaborators like Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Micahel Cera. But despite the namebrand cast, the film’s most important characters are the faceless federal bureaucrats played by unknowns who manipulate global markets and foreign policy to ensure Korda’s failure and ultimate financial ruin.
The Phonecian Scheme isn’t an egocentric defense of its director. Nor is it a sympathetic portrayal or an evisceration of the Trumpian billionaire class. It’s a movie about where we are now that revels in the contradictions of its seemingly unlikable characters. In short, it does the business of art in a way most of Hollywood abandoned a decade ago.
The Phonecian Scheme is now playing in theaters.