Tag: Wes Anderson

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Anderson marries heart, truth and a genuinely engaging and compelling plot with his unique quirk

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Benecio del Toro (Zsa-Zsa Korda), Mia Threapleton (Sister Liesl), Michael Cera (Bjorn Lund), Riz Ahmed (Prince Farouk), Tom Hanks (Leland), Bryan Cranston (Reagan), Mathieu Amalric (Marseilles Bob), Richard Ayoade (Sergio), Jeffrey Wright (Marty), Scarlett Johansson (Hilda Sussman), Benedict Cumberbatch (Uncle Nubar), Rupert Friend (Excalibur), Hope Davis (Mother Superior), Bill Murray (God), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Korda’s late wife), Willem Dafoe (Knave), F. Murray Abraham (Prophet), Stephen Park (Korda’s pilot), Alex Jennings (Broadcloth), Jason Watkins (Notary)

Wes Anderson is one of those directors I often sit on the fence about, with a style so distinctive it can in become overwhelming. But when it works, it works – and The Phoenician Scheme is (aside from his superb Netflix Dahl adaptations) his best work since his masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel. In this film, Anderson finds an emotional and story-telling engagement that adds depth to all the stylised invention. It’s a film I’ve found more rewarding the longer I’ve thought about it.

Set in an Anderson-esque 1950s (Andersonland?), notorious industrialist and arms trader Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benecio del Toro) spends his life dodging assassins. After one attempt gets close, he decides to try and repair his relationship with estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice nun who suspects her father might have had her mother murdered (he denies it). With governments, business competitors and others on his tail, Korda throws together a complex scheme for one last success in Phoenicia, a massive new development built with slave labour. As Korda juggles rivals and investors, will he repair his relationship with his daughter? And how will he fare in his recurrent visions of standing at the (noir) Gates of Heaven, being judged for entry?

Anderson’s film, of course, is another superb example of his visual style, constructed like an intricately layered work of art. Each shot could probably hang in an art gallery, framed to perfection with gorgeously sublime colours that soak off the screen. The elaborate set design and vintage costume work are striking as always, with every piece perfectly placed and every feature expertly judged. Within this, his carefully selected cast deliver the wry, dry and arch Anderson-dialogue with aplomb, embracing every moment (of many) where Anderson allows the characters to share a raised eyebrow or a pithy aside to the camera.

In other words, it might all be as you expect – a formula that started to feel a bit tired after intricate, insular films like The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, which felt so personal to Anderson that they were virtually impenetrable to everyone else. But what elevates The Phoenician Scheme is that Anderson embraces both a surprisingly tense plot-line – the closest he can probably get to a thriller, laced throughout with satire, humour and more than a fair share of the ridiculous – and gives a genuine emotional force to a father and daughter struggling to recognise what (if anything) could bring them together. Throw in questions around life, death and what constitutes making a life ‘worth living’ and you’ve got a rich, intriguing and rewarding film that could stand even without the Anderston scaffolding.

Perhaps only Anderson could mix an unscrupulous businessmen targeted by assassins (some of these are delightfully, blackly, comic – not least an opening plane bomb that sees Korda ejecting his pilot for refusing to attempt a crazy hail-Mary manoeuvre to survive an inevitable crash) with Korda closing vital deals (in a deliberately, impenetrably complex scheme) by shooting hoops with a pair of baseball-fanatic brothers (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, both hilarious), taking a bullet for a fez-wearing gangster (Matheiu Almaric, wonderfully weasily) and forcing an eccentric naval captain (Jeffrey Wright, perfectly deadpan) during a blood donation to sign with a bomb. And spin out a joke where Korda hands over custom-made hand grenades to business associates like they are branded pens. All while dodging a shady government cabal (fronted by Rupert Friend’s Transatlantic Arthurian-nick-named Excalibur).

But The Phoenician Scheme works because under this comic twist on spy thrillers, it has a real heart. Anderson’s finest films are where he works with an actor who can bring depth and feeling to the quirk. And here, he might just have brought out the best from an actor prone to a little quirk himself. Benecio del Toro gives Korda a world-weary cynicism but also a subtle fragility. There is nothing that won’t flummox Korda, a guy tipped off on attempts on his life because he frequently recognises assassins he’s hired himself in the past. But he’s also quietly afraid his life has been for nothing: that he is, in fact, not a rogue but an out-and-out villain ruining countless lives. And that God (in the form of, who else, Bill Murray) isn’t going to be welcoming up there.

It motivates a careful dance of reconciliation and grooming to take over his business with his estranged daughter Liesl, delightfully played by Mia Threapleton (with just the right mix of dead-pan flair for the dialogue, while giving it an arch warmth). Liesl imagines herself as distant from Korda as can be – the novice (literally) to his expert manipulator – but she turns out to have far more talent for Korda’s mix of chutzpah, disregard for rules and ruthless improvisation. Watching the relationship – and recognition – between these two (beautifully played by both actors) is very funny and also surprisingly sweet (you know its Anderson when a nun suddenly pulling a small machete out of her wimple is both oddly endearing and absolutely hilarious).

This sense of emotional development and personal and dramatic stakes is improved further by the celestial semi-trial (cue Willem Dafoe as an advocate angel), in a black-and-white heaven that mixes Powell and Pressburger’s Matter of Life and Death (surely the name Korda is no coincidence) and the imagery of Luis Buñuel. This all leads into a surprisingly gentle but affecting tale of redemption and second-chances, including an ending that feels surprising but also somehow completely, wonderfully inevitable and fitting,

The Phoenician Scheme may even be slightly under-served by its Andersonesque framing and design: after all it’s become easy to overlook the depths when the display is as extraordinary as this. When Anderson unearths a deeper meaning, working with masterful performers who can imbue his quirky, witty dialogue with heft, he can be one of the best out there. And do all that without sacrificing an air of charming whimsy, and building towards the most hilarious fist fight since Bridget Jones’s Diary (between del Toro and Cumberbatch’s tyrannically awful Uncle Nubar). Not a lot of directors can pull that off – and it’s a lovely reminder that Anderson at his best is an absolutely unique, wonderful gem in film-making.

Asteroid City (2023)

Anderson’s quirk filled film is a triumph of his own style but lacks the depth of his best work

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman (Augie Steenbeck/Jones Hall), Scarlett Johansson (Midge Campbell/Mercedes Ford), Tom Hanks (Stanley Zak), Jeffrey Wright (General Gibson), Tilda Swinton (Dr. Hickenlooper), Bryan Cranston (Host), Edward Norton (Conrad Earp), Adrien Brody (Schubert Green), Liev Schreiber (J.J. Kellogg), Hope Davis (Sandy Borden), Stephen Park (Roger Cho), Rupert Friend (Montana), Maya Hawke (June Douglas), Steve Carell (Motel manager), Matt Dillon (Mechanic), Hong Chau (Polly), Willem Dafoe (Saltzburg Keitel), Jake Ryan (Woodrow), Grace Edwards (Dinah), Aristou Meehan (Clifford), Sophia Lillis (Shelly), Ethan Josh Lee (Ricky)

Every time I go and see a Wes Anderson film, I hope I might fall in love again. Eventually, I’ll find something in Anderson’s overly distinctive, quirky style that I love as much as The Grand Budapest Hotel. Maybe the romantic in me is dying, because I think its never going to happen. Certainly it doesn’t with Asteroid City a film I sat watching thinking “I know some people will love this more than life itself, but for me sitting here it feels like waiting for the rapture”.

Asteroid City is another of Anderson’s films that’s an intricate puzzle box where the pieces shift like the brightly coloured squares on a Rubrik’s cube. It’s filtered through several layers of remove: we watch a 50s TV announcer (Bryan Cranston) introduce a stage performance of a playwright’s (Edward Norton) long-running play that is itself an entrée to a wide-screen, technicolour production of a host of eccentrics, including a recently widowed photographer (Jason Schwartzman), his grouchy father-in-law (Tom Hanks), a glamourous Hollywood star (Scarlett Johansson) and several others accompanying their kids to a remote town in the desert for a young stargazing and science competition co-sponsored by an army general (Jeffrey Wright), when the whole town is thrown into quarantine after a stop-motion alien drops in, looks around and flies off.

Somewhere in Asteroid City there is an interesting, slightly sad, meditation on grief, loss and ennui struggling to get out. The alien arrival makes everyone question the nature of the universe and their place in it. It’s easy to see the influence of Covid on a town flung into quarantine, and the resulting state of uncertainty throwing everyone off kilter. We are following a man who has recently lost his wife, being played in this film-within-a-play-within-a-TV-show by an actor who was (we discover) recently lost his own partner. At one point this actor asks the director if he is ‘doing it right’, if he is getting the emotion or the author’s intention: “just tell the story” the director (Adrien Brody) responds. I think that’s part of a message about just live and let the big questions take care of themselves, of trusting that we can do our loved ones proud. That’s an interesting, rewarding point.

But it’s lost in Anderson’s pitiless device, his never-ending quirk and the deliberately distancing, artificial nature of his world and the monotonous, arch delivery his script, camera work and editing imposes on a series of actors. What this film desperately misses is a leading player with the strength and independence of a Ralph Fiennes or a Gene Hackman: someone who can bring depth and a sense of reality to the stylised Anderson world, while still delivering something perfectly in keeping with his tone. To put it bluntly, Schwartzman is, to put it bluntly, not a sufficiently engaging or interesting actor to communicate his character’s inner turmoil under the surface which the film’s inner meaning requires. He too naturally, and trustingly, settles into the Anderson rhythm.

In this crucial role, he’s a misfire. With our leading player too much of an artificial character, someone we never believe is anything other than a construct of the film’s author, inhabited by a collaborator who doesn’t bring the independence or new vision the director needs, the more the deeper emotional layers of the film are drowned. Instead, the film becomes a crushing onslaught of style and trickery, devoid of any sense of reality at any point.

It eventually makes the film feel overly smug, too pleased with-itself, too taken with its intricate, tricksy construction. It is of course a triumph of art design and the photography is gorgeous, from the black-and-white of the TV studio and theatre, to the 60s tinged, artificial world of Asteroid City, crammed with its obviously fake skylines and vistas and technicolour inspired feel. That at least its impossible not to admire. But it’s also a mighty artificial trap that enfolds the entire film – and eventually the audience – in a world of weightless, arch, eyebrow-cocked commentary that promises a lot but winds up saying almost nothing of any interest.

There are performances to admire. Scarlett Johansson is very droll and finds some depths as an star actress struggling with a concealed depression. Tom Hanks looks most like the actor who feels like he can break out of the Anderson mould and discover some genuine emotion. Jeffrey Wright demonstrates few actors can do Anderson dialogue better than him, Bryan Cranston very droll and perfectly observed as Ed Murrow style TV man and Adrien Brody is loose, fun and inventive as the play’s director. But yet its everything inside this framework that feels somehow empty.

What I want from Anderson is someone to come in and shake him up, to point out that he is not betraying his aesthetics or style by injecting a small dose of reality and humanity into it. When he has done that in the past – moments in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and, above all, The Grand Budapest Hotel – he has delivered movies that are inventive, fun and playful but also carry real, lasting emotional impact. When he delivers in-jokes like Asteroid City, it feels like a party you have been invited to where everyone speaks in some made-up language they’ve not told you about in advance. And after not very long, all you want to do is to get up and leave.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Luscious visuals, hilarious gags mix with an air of sadness and regret in Wes Anderson’s masterpiece

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Ralph Fiennes (M. Gustav), Tony Revolori (Zero), F. Murray Abraham (Mr Moustafa), Mathieu Amalric (Serge X), Adrien Brody (Dmitri), Willem Dafoe (Jopling), Jeff Goldblum (Deputy Kovacs), Harvey Keitel (Ludwig), Jude Law (Young Writer), Bill Murray (M. Ivan), Edward Norton (Inspector Henckels), Saoirse Ronan (Agatha), Jason Schwartzman (M. Jean), Léa Seydoux (Clotilde), Tilda Swinton (Madame D), Tom Wilkinson (Author), Owen Wilson (M. Chuck)

I wrote recently I could forgive the flaws I’ve found in Kurosawa’s work, for the majesty of Seven Samurai. I can totally say the same again for Wes Anderson. He is a director I’ve sometimes found quirky, mannered and artificial – but God almighty he deserves a place in the pantheon for directing a film as near to perfection as The Grand Budapest Hotel, a delight from start to finish, as beautiful to look at as it is whipper-snap funny, as heart-warming to bathe in as it is coldly, sadly bittersweet. After three viewings I can say it is, without a doubt, a masterpiece.

Like many Wes Anderson films, its storyline is eccentric, halfway between fantasy and absurdity. In 1932, in an opulent hotel, The Grand Budapest, concierge Monsieur Gustav (Ralph Fiennes) is the pinnacle of his trade: precise, fastidious, perfectionist, he can fix anything anywhere – opera tickets, the perfect table placement and a night of passion at any time for the elderly widows who visit his hotel. When one of them, Madame D (Tilda Swinton) dies leaving him a priceless painting, Boy with Apple he suddenly finds himself framed for her murder. Only his ingenuity, and the dedicated help of his protégé, best friend and surrogate brother/son, lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) will save him.

You can’t escape on the first viewing that The Grand Budapest Hotel is an extraordinarily funny film. Crammed with superb one-liners, it’s a showcase for a breathtakingly, blissfully funny performance from Ralph Fiennes whose comic timing is exquisite and whose mastery of the perfectly structured monologue of flowery language is as spot-on as his ability to deliver a crude punch-line. Anderson fills the film with clever sight-gags, bounce and a supreme sense of fun. You’ll laugh out loud (I frequently do, and I remember most of the gags) and wind back to watch them again.

But what lifts this is the wonderfully evocative, elegiac piece this beautiful film is. For all its comic zip, it unfolds in a romanticised past already a relic in 1932. We can’t escape the rise of Fascism that fills the film. Jack-booted soldiers accost and hunt Gustav and Zero. Adrien Brody’s furious heir to Madame D looks like a Gestapo officer, and his vicious heavy Jopling (Willem Dafoe so weathered, he looks like he’s been beaten by a carpet duster) has a stormtrooper menace. En route to Madame D’s funeral, Zero is nearly dragged off the train to be lynched by fascist thugs for being an immigrant and The Grand Budapest is taken over by this dreadful movement, filled with Mussolini-inspired ZZ insignia and blackshirts.

Under the jokes, the world Gustav represents has already died and been buried. We are never allowed to forget we are marching, inexorably, towards a very real-world war that will rip apart this fictional country and leave millions dead. Gustav’s gentile old-school charm ended with 1920s: and he sort of knows it. Fiennes, under the suaveness, conveys a man who falls back into potty language when he can no longer maintain his assured confidence that a straight-backed, polite assurance will solve any problem or a poetic reflection will allow them to put any unpleasantness behind them. Those days are gone and it makes for a deep, rich vein of sadness just under the surface.

It’s particularly acute because it’s made clear this is a memory piece. Anderson constructs the film like a memory box. It has no less than three framing devices. It opens and closes with a young woman in 2014 visiting a monument to a great writer, the author of the book The Grand Budapest Hotel. From there we flash back to the author (a droll Tom Wilkinson) in 1985 recounting how he met the man who inspired the novel, before heading again to a flashback to the 1960s where the young author (Jude Law) meets the man we discover is an older Zero (F Murray Abraham) who recounts the story we then watch. Each layer of the film descends deeper into Anderson’s artificial, carefully structured visual style, with its heightened sense of reality.

Old Zero – beautifully played by F. Murray Abraham – is introduced as a man of acute loneliness and sadness, who tells us early on the woman his young self loves, Agatha (a radiant Saoirse Ronan) will die and shuffles around the nearly abandoned The Grand Budapest (now a concrete nightmare of Communist architecture) with only his memories for comfort. No matter how jovial and bright the events of the 1930s are, we can’t forget that these are the reflections of a man full of regrets.

When old Zero’s narration turns to remembering Agatha, the lights around him dim: Agatha even enters the narrative almost by the side door: Gustav is arrested and imprisoned before she appears, along with a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks to Zero and her meeting and her first meeting with Gustav, as if Zero had to steel himself to remember her (as reflected in Abraham’s tear-stained face). Later, when remembering the fates of Gustav (his best friend) and Agatha (the love of his life) he almost draws a veil over it (even their final scenes in flashback play out in monochrome). There is a deep, moving sense of humanity here, a powerful thread of grief that adds immense richness.

But don’t forget this is also a funny film! Anderson is an inventive visual and narrative director at the best of times, and here every single beat of his playful style pays off in spades. The entire 1930s section of the film (the overwhelming bulk of the narrative) plays out in 4:3 ratio, which to many other directors would be restrictive, but seems a perfect fit for a director who often composes his visuals with the skill of an expert cartoonist. The frame is frequently filled in every direction when within the grandeur of the hotel, but then feels marvellously restrictive for Gustav’s prison cell or the train compartments that seem to constantly carry Zero and him to disaster.

Anderson’s wonderfully precise camera movements also reach their zenith here. His camera is deceptively static, often placed in a series of perfectly staged compositions that places the characters at their heart, frequently looking at us. But then the camera will turn – frequently in a fluid single-plain ninety degrees to reveal a new image of character. There are Steadicam tracking shots that are a dream to watch. It’s combined with some truly astounding model shots (parts of the set are not-even-disguised animated models and miniatures, adding to the sense of fantasia) and the detail of every inch of the design (astounding work from Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock) is perfection. The film is an opulent visual delight.

It’s a film of belly laughs and then moments of haunting sadness. But also, a wonderful celebration of friendship. The bond between Gustav and Zero is profound, natural and deeply moving – grounded, fittingly, in adversity from the agents of a hostile, oppressive state – and carries real emotional force. Newcomer Tony Revolori is hugely endearing as naïve but brave Zero, making his way in this new world (fitting the theme, he left his homeland after his family was destroyed by war) and sparks superbly with Fiennes and Ronan.

There is a wonderful beating heart in The Grand Budapest Hotel, amongst the farce, perfectly timed gags and cheekiness, that makes it a rich film you can luxuriate in. Anderson’s direction is faultless, Fiennes is a breathtaking revelation, both hilarious, affronted, decent and fighting the good fight. Gorgeous to look at, thought-provoking and laugh-out loud funny it’s a dream of a film.