I missed Wes Anderson’s last two features, The French Dispatch (2021) and Asteroid City (2023), as well as his quartet of short films, including the Oscar-winning The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023). This wasn’t necessarily intentional, although I do sometimes feel the need to take a break from the Andersonian aesthetic because it is so unrelenting in its highly designed quirkiness. This is not to say that I don’t like his films. In fact, I hold a number of them in extremely high regard, and I have deep respect for the manner in which he is able to maintain such consistency of style while nevertheless making films that feel original and unique. It is just that I find the overall effect of them exhausting in the aggregate, so they are best taken individually with plenty of down time in-between.

Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, does not disappoint, although it also does not stand with his best works (which are, most recently, 2012’s Moonlight Kingdom and 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel). It is uniquely Andersonian in form and function, spinning a wildly implausible tale about an eccentric, probably dangerous, but utterly engaging millionaire industrialist named Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) who spends the entire movie travelling around a fictionalized version of southern Europe and north Africa trying to shore up financial investments in a massive project he has been putting together for decades that will somehow bring together a railroad, a tunnel, a hydroelectric dam, and a canal—essentially all of the major technological innovations of travel and power in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Much of the action unfolds in and around the fictional country of the title, Phoenicia, sometime in the early 20th century. Zsa-Zsa is essentially an Eastern European Howard Hughes (others have pegged the Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian as his primary influence), and Benicio del Toro (who previously appeared in The French Dispatch) is an excellent foil for Anderson’s narrative and aesthetic style (much like Bill Murray, who of course has a role, this time as God in the film’s Pasolini-esque black-and-white flights of fancy into the afterlife, which also include Willem Dafoe and F. Murray Abraham). Del Toro’s placid eyes and amusingly hangdog face are the perfect visual counterpoint for the absurdist situations in which he constantly finds himself (the film opens with one of many assassination attempts, this one blowing a hole in the side of the plane he is on, forcing him to take over the controls and crash-land in a cornfield, after which he appears, improbably still alive, holding one of his organs on the outside).

Zsa-Zsa’s partner is his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who he retrieves from a convent where she is planning on becoming a nun. Liesl’s deadpan face and unblinking eyes counterbalance Zsa-Zsa’s wild scheming, which he organizes in a series of vintage shoeboxes that become the narrative’s organizing conceit (instead of chapters, we get shoeboxes). Also along for the ride is Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), a meek Norwegian entomologist who serves as Zsa-Zsa’s tutor and administrative assistant. Along the way they meet with a series of characters, each of whom Zsa-Zsa needs to buy into his ambiguous master plan: Phoenician Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed); American brothers Leland and Reagan (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston); French nightclub owner Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric); New York ship captain Marty (Jeffrey Wright); cousin Hilda Sussman (Scarlett Johansson); and, most notoriously, Uncle Newbar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Zsa-Zsa’s estranged half-brother. And, if that weren’t enough, Zsa-Zsa’s plans are constantly endangered by an intellectual revolutionary (Richard Ayoade) and a band of international businessmen headed by U.S. agent Excalibur (Rupert Friend) who spy on his actions and try to upend the markets to destroy his plans. And then there are the assassination attempts—which are quite frequent.

Penned by Anderson from a story he concocted with regular collaborator Roman Coppola, The Phoenician Scheme hits all the expected marks from a new entry in the Andersonian oeuvre, complete with vintage production design, outlandish characters, and plenty of deadpan humor packed into his meticulously arranged compositions and planometric camera movements. Although he was working for the first time with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who shot the film using the old VistaVision process on 35mm film, Anderson still maintains his consistency of vision. He has long toyed with violence in his films, sometimes playing it straight but often using it for comical exaggeration, and here he goes for broke, pushing the bounds of PG-13 limitations by making the carnage as cartoonish as possible (in the first 60 seconds a character is blown in half, his upper torso reduced to a gaudy red spray, but it is done in such a cartoonish fashion that the initial shock immediately gives way to laughter). This degree of daring is part of what gives Anderson’s films their edge, so that even when much of it feels familiar, you know you are always in potentially dangerous territory. If anything, Anderson remains a filmmaker who can surprise and delight while still delivering exactly what is expected of him.

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