Help yourself to a hand grenade

The rarest of things — I saw a movie on its opening night in Vilnius and am hear to report it like a diligent scribe. I was surprised to see such a small turnout at the Pasaka — a little art house in the Paupys district of the city. I had chosen to walk from Žverynas, thinking I could comfortably make it in 45 minutes. Not sure how it ended up taking me one hour but I got to the art house just in time. Along the way I had seen the many signs for the Pink Soup Fest on Saturday. I was wearing my pink soup or šaltibarščių t-shirt underneath my frayed HH canvas shirt to get into the mood. Maybe that subconsciously slowed me down. Daina had called me in route and asked if I wanted popcorn. Something to drink too, I said, as I had worked up a light sweat on my forehead. Irena had come as well. We all sat in the middle of aisle four in the tiny box that might seat 100 persons. It was maybe half full.

That’s pretty rare for a Wes Anderson movie, as he has quite a following in Vilnius, but possibly people were surprised to see The Phoenician Scheme come so soon after Cannes. I wouldn’t have given it any thought had I not seen a movie poster the day before on the door of the old Skalvija movie theater near the Opera House. I figured it would be coming in June or July but checked the theater listings, and there it was scheduled at the Pasaka over the weekend. The two theaters are part of the same Europa Cinemas chain.

I had no great expectations as I had been mildly disappointed with Asteroid City and The French Dispatch. I was just going to let the movie wash over me and not try to analyze it too much. It was a good decision as the scheme seemed too complicated for its own good and I made no effort to figure out how Zsa Zsa Korda was going to profit from this elaborate venture literally contained within shoe and shirt boxes he had laid out on the floor of his Italian villa to explain to his estranged daughter Liesl, who glowed through her novitiate habit.

It was nice to see a newcomer to the Wes Anderson troupe and Mia Threapleton beautifully held her own against her overbearing presumed father, impeccably played by Benicio del Toro. As with Wes’ last four full-length movies, The Phoenician Scheme is entirely staged. Even the corn field, desert and jungle scenes seemed entirely contrived within Studio Babelsberg. I believe the last film that Wes shot in the wild, so to speak, was Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps my favorite of all his films although it varies depending on my mood.

We all know Wes has long held a soft spot for the theater. We saw wonderful glimpses of this in Rushmore. Who can forget his staging of Serpico as a high school play? Over the years he has dropped all pretenses of shooting outdoors as he drifted deeper into his playful fantasies, the most recent being a delightful collection of Roald Dahl short films. I think doing Fantastic Mr. Fox may have spurred him in this direction, as his movies now all have the feeling of stop-motion animation. Some may find this annoying, but I enjoy it. Although I think he went too far with Asteroid City with its many layers, overly complicating what was at heart a simple story. It was like he tried to squeeze three movies in one, but who am I to begrudge Wes’ indulgences? It was still fun to watch, although our daughter said she couldn’t make it through the movie even after three tries.

This time around, Wes stuck to a very linear story, not letting himself get sidetracked, and I think the film was better for it if feeling a little threadbare after his more elaborate efforts. I found it odd that for all the wealth being projected in his imaginary industrialists and financiers, the settings were quite spartan, especially the Art Deco nightclub whose only telling feature was an elaborate chandelier and ceiling that the band of revolutionaries shot up much to the chagrin of the owner Marseille Bob. BTW, playing Night in Tunisia was a nice touch. At first I thought this might be a budget constraint but I believe this was a conscious choice to show the emptiness of his wealthy characters. Hence, the oddly religious theme in which Sister Liesl tries and eventually succeeds in getting her father to turn from his wicked ways and accept an authority higher than himself. It is not so much an epiphany as it is the realization he can’t outrun death forever.

Like all Wes Anderson films, there is a deep pathos at the heart of his stories, a sense of abandonment. Zsa Zsa has been estranged from his daughter for most of her life. His nine boys are mostly adopted as I understood. All his wives were dead and it was assumed he killed them in fits of rage, which he vehemently denied. At first Liesl didn’t believe him but over the course of the film we learned that Zsa Zsa had been abandoned by his own father and everything he built he had done so with his own two hands. He just was never able to foster a family of his own and wanted to make restitution by bequeathing everything he had to Liesl.

There is another new actor to the Wes Anderson troupe. I never much liked Michael Cera but he fit right into his character Bjorn Lund as if he was born to play the role, and then just as neatly transformed himself into an agent for a consortium of bureaucrats, led by Rupert Friend as Excalibur, who were trying to undermine Korda’s elaborate scheme by hording “bashable rivets.” Korda needed these rivets to build all these grand enterprises in the fictional country of Phoenicia in the midst of a civil war occurring sometime in the 1950s. Again, the particulars don’t really matter as Bjorn falls in love with Liesl and pledges himself to her after a second plane crash in the jungles of this very odd Middle Eastern country.

Having missed Bill Murray in Asteroid City, it was fun to see him return as God in the heavenly scenes that are interspersed throughout the film. We get other alums as well like F. Murray Abraham and Willem Dafoe, as if drawn from a black and white tableau derived from Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. Given that Zsa Zsa has confronted death so many times, these scenes make perfect sense if you can believe it.

The story speeds along as Zsa Zsa contacts each of his wealthy associates hoping that they will cover the enormous cost of “the gap” he has incurred due to the astronomical rise in price of bashable rivets. We meet another newcomer in Riz Ahmed as Prince Farouk who finds himself engaged in an amusing basketball game with alums Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as wealthy American industrial brothers. All this in a tunnel of amazing length, as they seem to have come all the way from Sacramento on their private train. If you delve this deeply into theater, great distances no longer matter.

I don’t know how Wes is able to get so many great actors to sign onto his movies for such tiny roles. His clout has grown immeasurably, like the cost of bashable rivets, but it feels like each role is hand tailored to that particular actor. I read that Wes spent two years chasing down Gene Hackman, as he had written the role of Royal Tenenbaum specifically for him. Hackman had rejected the young director at every turn before finally accepting the role, and the rest as they say is history. You cannot imagine Royal as anyone other than Gene.

Eventually, we get to the final person on the list, Uncle Nubar as he is called, and who better to play him than Benedict Cumberbatch. The “Biblically evil” uncle rejects Zsa Zsa’s offer of a hand grenade, an intriguing lietmotif throughout the movie, saying he has one of his own. It is the ending we expected but done in such a way as to exceed expectations. Liesl gets some closure here although she isn’t quite sure who to believe when the matter of her parentage comes up, but she has come to accept Zsa Zsa as her father despite all his faults. This results in a very touching closing scene that strips away all the wealthy veneer and seems to give Zsa Zsa the happiness that has eluded him all these years.

I’m not sure what happened to Zsa Zsa’s immense wealth. Did he lose it in the scheme or did he donate it all to the Catholic church to which he converted? It doesn’t really matter. The Phoenician Scheme was never really more than a McGuffin to spur the story into action. I have read reviews that state this was the angriest film that Wes Anderson has made, as if he was challenging capitalism. I don’t think Wes cares that much for money, but rather how it had become a hindrance for Zsa Zsa, whose life had grown so incredibly empty that he needed to reconnect himself with his lone daughter. I suppose if you were analyzing this film, you might say the nine boys were a thinly veiled reference to Elon Musk but here again I think Wes mostly used them as a comic foil. Although here too, Zsa Zsa sought reconciliation in his own gruff manner.

If I were to give ratings, I would rate The Phoenician Scheme three-and-a-half hand grenades out of five, but what’s the point? You either like a movie or you don’t and I liked this movie, mostly because it was enjoyable and made me think about relationships in a way I otherwise wouldn’t have thought of them. That’s what is so appealing about all Wes Anderson movies. He has a way of channeling pathos that doesn’t come across as schmaltzy despite the confectionary settings. It’s like getting a candy that isn’t as sweet as you imagined it and are better off for it. I would like to see Wes return to more earthy settings like he did in The Royal Tenenbaums, another one of my favorite movies, but I think he so thoroughly enjoys the world he has made for himself in these most recent films that he is not likely to go back. Why should he?