In Wes Anderson's New Movie, He Renounces His Stuff
Until I was surrounded by it, I don't think I'd realized quite how much stuff there is in Wes Anderson's movies. Walking through the exhibition dedicated to Anderson's career at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, I paid my respects to Ben Stiller and sons' matching tracksuits from The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic 's pencil ponyfish, but what struck me were the objects I didn't remember—especially the books. Practically every section devoted to one of Anderson's films featured some sort of printed matter, designed with a care belying its brief time on-screen: the programs for Margot Tenenbaum's plays; the lobby cards for Steve Zissou's documentaries; the cover of Moonrise Kingdom 's Coping With the Very Troubled Child , by Romulus Trilling, MD One case is devoted to the exquisite stop-motion figures from Fantastic Mr. Fox , including the farmer Petey, posed in a miniature armchair whose fabric bears the telltale signs of being ravaged by a house cat—and there, on a tiny end table at his side, sits an even tinier copy of Roald Dahl's story.
There's so much stuffed into the exhibition that it takes a while to notice what isn't there, which is virtually anything related to Anderson himself. Across town, the Agnès Varda exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet practically overflows with photos of Varda's ex-lovers and friends, not to mention her cats. But you could easily make it through the Wes Anderson exhibition without learning that he has a partner and a child, let alone anything that might inform a deeper understanding of his work. In one corner are an array of the spiral notebooks in which Anderson writes his screenplays, several marked with a Manhattan phone number in case the notebook should go astray. We have a whim, I dialed it. It went straight to voicemail. (No US date for the exhibition has been announced, but an English-language version of its catalog will be published in September.)
Given that his new film's main character is based in part on Anderson's late father-in-law, Fouad Malouf, to whom it's also dedicated, you might expect that The Phoenician Scheme would be the filmmaker's most personal work. But if it is, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Slate's Dana Stevens wrote that it's like watching a story unfold through a “ thick pane of emotion-proof glass ,” and having spent an afternoon looking at Anderson's artifacts in transparent cases, the experience is not all that different. In some ways, it's the closest Anderson has come to making a spy thriller, following Benicio del Toro's wealthy industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda as he jets around a fictionalized version of the Middle East, dodging assassination attempts as he cuts deals with unscrupulous and unusual characters. But its beyond-deadpan tone is fixed in the opening seconds, when a bomb blows a hole in the side of Zsa-zsa's plane and reduces his assistant, or at least the top half of his body, to a bloody smear. The entire sequence takes place in one unmoving shot, with the soon-to-be dead man already an abstract blob in the corner before the blast turns him into a Pollock painting. And as for Zsa-zsa, he barely bats an eye. “Myself,” he will say over and over again, no matter how presents the potential danger to his life, “I feel perfectly safe.”
He may fancy himself indestructible, but Zsa-zsa knows he's getting on in years, and it's time to set in motion the final act of his life, a massive, region-spanning construction project that involves tunneling through mountains and hydroelectric dams and, well, the details are never very clear. But the upshot is it will be transformative and, at least for Zsa-zsa, highly profitable, continuing to pay out long after he's breathed his last. Although he has nine sons, some biological and some adopted—the odds of success, he reasons, are better that way—none of them has turned out to be a suitable heir, so he summons his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, an actress who is herself an heiress as the daughter of Kate Winslet), from a Catholic convent and lays out his plan for her. Each phase of the project is represented by a box that once held shoes or hats or shirts but now contains a piece of his life. It's a detail drawn straight from life: Anderson's father-in-law, a Lebanese engineer, did the same when he began to succumb to dementia, retrieving a pile of shoeboxes from the back of a closet to show his daughter how he'd spent his life.
The Phoenician Scheme is like one of those boxes, filled with objects whose significance we can only guess at. It's even shaped like a box, filmed in an aspect ratio of 1.5:1 that's almost never used for moving pictures, although it's common in 35 mm still photography. The movie's opening credits roll over an overhead shot of Zsa-zsa in an opulent bathroom, soaking in the tub as servants bring him food and chilled Champagne. The floor's tiled border perfectly matches the shape of the frame, as if to underline the fact that this entire world, and Zsa-zsa's entire life, has been built to spec.
Emphasizing the border of the frame also draws attention to what's outside it. Zsa-zsa's power brokering—he is known as “Mr. Five Percent” for his habitual cut of the many deals he's arranged—has included the occasional arms deal, and he casually informs Liesl that some pieces of his grand scheme rely on using slave labor (although he qualifies that workers will actually be paid a modest stipend) and engineering a famine to make the locals more open to his demands. Like the billionaires of Succession , Zsa-zsa lives a life designed to insulate him from the consequences of his actions, and the movie never takes us outside the boundaries of his experience. His enslaved workforce remains as theoretical to all us as it is to him. But while no one wants to see Wes Anderson's version of a labor camp, he seems determined to underline the limits of his habitual approach and indicate what lies beyond them, effectively showing what he can't show. When Zsa-zsa's plane goes down after that initial bombing, Anderson skips over the crash and just shoots the wreckage, the camera scrolling sideways through a field of broken cornstalks and monogrammed luggage. He builds to a climactic moment, like the fateful basketball shot that will determine whether Zsa-zsa's plans go up in smoke, then cuts away before it's done, leaving us to glean what happened from the scenes that follow. It's both playful and perverse, denying the audience big moments and developing its appetite for smaller ones.
As he tries to organize his life, Zsa-zsa keeps flirting with death, and every time he has an especially close encounter with his own mortality, Anderson cuts to a black-and-white interlude involving what the credits refer to as a “biblical troupe,” a group of actors, including Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, who, in a variety of paintings, seem to be judging Zsa-zsa's deeds in the afterlife. (Bill Murray, naturally, plays God.) The scenes are blatantly artificial, with crude wigs and ratty false beards, and although the first one appears to be a hallucination Zsa-zsa has when he's lying unconscious after the crash, they eventually take on a life of their own. Anderson has said he believes only “ roughly ” in God, and while Liesl enters Zsa-zsa's life as a pious woman, she's not immune to the pleasures of the flesh: She starts drinking and smoking a pipe, even as she keeps pressing him to use his wealth and power in a less blatantly immoral fashion. In part, he's winning at the lurid biblical epics of early cinema, which depicted the debauchery of the damned with far more zest than they did their occasional salvation. (Zsa-zsa's surname evokes the prolific British filmmaker Alexander Korda, who directed his own version of Samson and Delilah as well as producing several films for Michael Powell, one of Anderson's more pronounced influences.) But he's sincere about the underlying issue of legacy, especially as it relates to the privileges of wealth.
If Asteroid City was Wes Anderson's defense of his own methods , a feature-length argument that his immaculately manicured style simply expresses emotion in the way that feels most natural to him, The Phoenician Scheme is his exploration of everything those methods aren't sufficient to encompass, and what inhabiting a made-to-measure world, as both a person and an artist, might have cut him off from. One of Zsa-zsa's admirers observes, “He's not human—he's biblical.” But Anderson wants to find a way for him to be both, to achieve legendary stature and high style without losing his appreciation for life's more elementary pleasures. On one of the stops he makes to secure his legacy, Zsa-zsa visits a dam inscribed with a verse from Exodus about holding back the waters, a citation that would make the builder of the dam, ie, him, the equivalent of God. But the story contrives to remind him that he is only a man, and his life is more fulfilling the more he realizes it.
