The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

by Adelaide Song on 2025-07-02.
Tags: film comedy

Spoilers follow.

At this point in his career, Wes Anderson is arthouse cilantro. Critics of his oeuvre seem insistent on painting him as all style, no substance, too focussed on planimetric shots and twee hijinks to deliver anything of any humanity. While liveblogging Nabokov’s Pale Fire to my friend group, one particularly mutual called him a “writer of gauze.” I imagine many of Anderson’s objectors would dub him a director of the same.

I’m under no impressions that I, of all people, could sway anyone who’s hardened their heart into giving Anderson a second chance. But if you run hot and cold on him—or just don’t really have an opinion either way—I would highly recommend diving back in with The Phoenician Scheme. If you love his work, even better. Consider the last couple films of his career:The French Dispatch, so precise in its construction it had actors blinking on-beat, or Asteroid City, Anderson’s spin onSynecdche, New York. By comparison The Phoenician Scheme is comfort food.

That’s not to call it shallow—we’ll get into it later—but its charms are far more obvious to those who aren’t Wesheads. At its heart, The Phoenician Scheme is a simple roadtrip movie, its acts neatly divided into literal boxes for the audience’s digestion. After an umpteenth assassination attempt narrowly fails, infamous arms dealer Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) attemps to pull off the titular scheme, a utopian development project that’ll fund his family for perpetuity. In case this trip ends up being his last, he forcibly pulls his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) out of her tranquil convent life, and makes her both his sole heir and accomplice.

We follow their journey across the globe as they attempt to cover “the gap”, the hole in the project’s budget created by the CIA knockoff’s financial sabotage. Various wacky misadventures result as Zsa-Zsa tries and fails repeatedly to scam his investors out of the money he needs, while Liesl grapples with the temptations of her new-found material wealth.

From the names of the director and the cast alone, you’d expect them to knock this premise out of the cast, and they do. del Toro and Threapleton are absolutely electric, working perfectly together as an unrepentant devil and his beleaguered conscience. It’s a great credit to their dynamic that the star-studded list of Korda’s creditors (including Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, and Mathieu Amalric) never overshadows either half—especially impressive for Threapleton, for whom this film is her first leading role. Liesl is the film’s most important anchor, serving as both its moral compass and the audience stand-in. It’s not an easy thing to pull off under the direction of someone who seems to spend every moment straining against ordinary reality, but it’s a high-flying act that Threapleton nails with effortless charisma and quiet dignity.

Of course, if we want to talk about scene-stealing side characters, we have to talk about Michael Cera. I can’t believe it took this long for him and Anderson to work together. If you’ve watched even a single episode of Arrested Development, you’d immediately understand why these two work so well together. Cera’s ability to break comedy conservation of mass and generate impossibly huge laughs out of tiny expressions tempers Anderson’s tendencies towards excess whimsy. The idea of a privately hired entomology teacher who speaks in his best Swedish chef impression—and turns out to be an undercover spy with serious martial skills—should be so dumb it shatters the movie. But Cera’s deep in his George Michael bag here, and he plays it so smoothly you feel like the silly one for questioning it.

It would be easy to look no further into the film and leave it at that, just an exercise in amusement akin to Top Secret! But it’s clear from Korda’s first brush with death that the film has its eyes set on something far more grand than a simple spoof. These Biblical black-and-white sequences are the most obvious tells as to the film’s primary thematic throughline: Anderson is clearly thinking about things ending. (Sorry.)

Maybe this goes without saying at this point in time. Death hangs over every moment of The Grand Budapest Hotel by virtue of its framing device alone, to say nothing of what actually happens in that film. (As soon as Scheme comes out on VOD, I highly recommend watching the two back-to-back as companion pieces.) The French Dispatch is, likewise, framed as a kind of eulogy for the newspaper’s fictional luminary. The Royal Tenenbaums starts with someone pretending they’re going to die (and then ends with them dying.) You could go on.

There’s just something about Scheme that made me leave the theater keenly aware that Anderson is on the far side of fifty years old. For one, the film is dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, Fouad Malouf¹. Much of Zsa-Zsa’s character is drawn from him—probably not the whole international warmongerer thing, but in a particularly poignant turn, the shoebox framing device was taken directly from the twilight of his life. Each time Zsa-Zsa escapes death, each successive vision of what awaits him on the other side haunts him more and more. By the end of the film, he is so shaken that he goes back on using slave labor and an engineered famine² to help fund the scheme, putting himself into poverty instead for the good of humanity.

Perhaps the question of what’s different about this Anderson film is as simple as this: he is making this film in 2025, not 2014. I don’t doubt he’s thought about death throughout his life; it’s kind of a big deal. But as too many of us will attest, there is a stark and terrible difference between dealing with our mortality in the abstract and in the material. “That’s what happens when you’re 56 years old,” in his words.

If there’s any literary work I would compare this film to, it’s “Journey of the Magi.” “Magi”, like Scheme, is written from the perspective of a man at the end of his life. Like Zsa-Zsa, its narrator has experienced something undeniably divine; in Zsa-Zsa’s case, a literal trial before God, in “Magi”, the birth of Jesus Christ himself. In both cases, though, fear and doubt still clearly haunt them. Clearly these characters recognize the necessity of their conversion, but it’s just that which motivates them—necessity. “This Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” “I’ll be religious, if that’s what’s right.” I don’t know what conclusion Anderson himself has come to, nor do I feel particularly inclined to press him about it. I just hope he escapes the shadow that haunts this film.