'The Phoenician Scheme' Is Another Bespoke Slice of Wes Anderson Movie Magic

“It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a family!” That line of dialogue was spoken by one Flanders “Flan” Kittredge (Donald Sutherland) in the 1993 film version of Six Degrees of Separation. A wonderful film and a wonderful performance (go watch it if you never have), which coincidentally you could drop down into any Wes Anderson movie without breaking a single bead of sweat. (What a shame that Sutherland and Anderson never got to work together—they would’ve made a fine pair.)

A sideways entry to a review but, like so many of his camera moves, sideways is a good way to come up on a Wes Anderson movie. Anyway it’s a line of dialogue that wouldn’t quit echoing in my brain after getting out of this his latest, the father-daughter reunion slash espionage romp The Phoenician Scheme.

Starring Benicio Del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, the latest rich bastard in a long line of Anderson’s rich bastards, and Mia Threapleton as the bastard’s eldest, the nun-in-training Liesl, the lesson on hand here is very much, “It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a family.” And just how thin the line between those two things can be. At one point Korda says to his side-eyeing daughter the extremely similar-sounding, “It’s not called spying when you’re the parent; it’s called nurturing.” Flan much, Zsa-zsa?

And only in the review of a Wes Anderson movie could I write a line like that and get away with it. (If I did; you tell me.) So yes it’s yet another pair of estranged pops and tots loosed into the Anderson canon—a deep bench of disappointment and sadness and heart-hurt flowing in both directions, up and down the lavishly illustrated family tree. The best Andersons are awash in this resignation, an emotional ennui that coats over the perfectly appointed wallpapers enriching the director’s diorama instincts with a pathos that puts the lie to the ceaseless caws of his most fervent critics’ and their charges of ever vacuous twee-isms.

The Phoenician Scheme, truth be told, is probably not one of “the best Andersons.” But it’s a gosh-darn good one—picture a pile of books piled up in Anderson’s methodical piling fashion and this movie belongs to its upper middle tier. The clash between its zaniness and its despair is pure Wes anyway—nowhere does every punchline land like the fall of a foot headed toward the gallows more than it does in these well-manicured hands. Saturated in a surprising allotment of violence (that dead dog in Moonrise Kingdom ain’t seen nothing yet), utter chaos, and a gorgeous Kodachrome palette, The Phoenician Scheme is half-caper half-dirge, a flavor unique to the director’s talents and one entirely addictive once it’s sunk its claws down into your best corduroy jacket.

It’s a fix, ain’t it? I’m a very happy critic whenever a fresh Wes Anderson picture is boxed, bowed, and sent down the assembly line to scratch at the itches only Wes knows about. Even when the water’s luke-warm, when the model-set glue seams are showing and the stage mustaches are voluminously frayed, he’s really just kind of out here showing off these days. Tati on steroids. An old-timey choo-choo of inspirations and signifiers that keep piling up year after year, picture after picture—variations on the same themes giving each successive experience in Wes-ville a sense of accumulated depth. As a life’s work it’s certainly a living.

As for the tycoon Zsa-zsa and his wimpled kin, this as-ever old-school serial sees them traversing the fictional 1950s land of Phoenicia, a Middle-Eastern-ish tableau of camel-backs and Casablancish watering holes, in order to set right the old man’s highly combustible affairs before one of his many enemies succeed in assassinating him after many failed-to-date attempts at doing just that. He’s called Liesl back from yonder nunnery to force her into his business dealings after years of them not speaking—she’s convinced he, or someone on his behalf, murdered her mother. Which is the sort of thing that even in a place like Phoenicia can put a kink in your relationship.

The two bicker in that sly dry way that every Anderson character does. They wield diamond-encrusted daggers and complimentary gift-cases of hand grenades. They encounter a fictional country’s worth of character actors done up in designer Milena Canonero’s again immediately iconic costumes, carved as ever out of the stuff of our collective memory. Scarlett Johanson as Desert Heidi; Riz Ahmed as a Gatsby-ian prince (and yes Wes shoots Riz in profile several times, and yes it remains the most perfect profile in the movies). Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston show up as a pair of bickering Richie Riches who would’ve been the bad guys in a Buster Keaton movie.

Most importantly, there’s Michael Cera, an actor who like the forever lost possibility of Donald Sutherland from this review’s very first paragraph represents the Platonian Ideal of Wes Anderson Actor. And yet, wildly, this marks the two’s first collaboration. Expect it to be the first of many then, because man oh man does it yield sufficient rewards. Playing a Swedish entomologist named Bjorn who looks like Marilyn Monroe had a baby with Eraserhead, Cera is guaranteed to wring anything ranging from chuckle to guffaw every time Anderson’s camera lands upon him; it’s not fair to say he steals the picture given how terrific Del Toro and Threapleton are, but somebody should’ve checked his pockets as he left the set every day because there were at least big chunks of it being smuggled off.

Point being even a mid-tier Wes Anderson movie is wilier and more wondrous than what at least three-quarters of cinema has to offer in 2025, and it’s likely that The Phoenician Scheme (as I find to be the case with most of Wes’s movies) will look even better on second, third, fifth revisit. Only then can your eyes even come close to taking in the assault of details that these magic-boxes stuff every which way corner with. I didn’t even get around to the stage pageant Afterlife scenes starring Bill Murray as God in full voluminous God get-up, for Bill Murray’s sake.

An adventure about bridging the distance between generations, finding a sliver of enlightenment, and of course the joy of large rectangular beards, this is another singular experience from perhaps our most singular movie-maker. And the little slice of Heaven that it manages to dig up in its closing moments is maybe among Wes’s most moving stuff to date. As the play-sets keep accruing size and ever more fantastical flourishes, Anderson still never loses sight of the plain simple stuff that matters—a common ground for bespoke characters, resonating far out beyond their exquisite composition.