The Phoenician Scheme: Funny but Call a Script Doctor

 

 

 

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Directed and screenplay by Wes Anderson

Focus Features, 101 minutes, PG-13

★★★

 

If I were a producer of a Wes Anderson film I’d insist on a script doctor. The Phoenician Scheme is one of Anderson’s better films in recent memory, but it could have been a fantastic one with some tightening and greater continuity.

 

Like many Anderson films, this one has a big cast with recognizable stars. I can understand why so many actors want to work with Anderson. His films have a chaotic feel that suggest the cast had free reign to improvise and had a lot of fun on the set. No one is likely to confuse an Anderson project with Citizen Kane, though it’s likely it and many other movies will be hinted at; one of the fun things about Anderson’s films is trying to decipher what inspired what detail. For instance, the art on the walls in The Phoenician Scheme is real and historical characters such as Aristotle Onassis and William Randolph Hearst are models for some of Anderson’s robber barons and amoral protagonists.

 

Putatively set in the 1950s, The Phoenician Scheme centers on armaments dealer Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), who is as morality-challenged as they come, but even he has limits. After surviving his sixth plane crash, eHeaveneach an assassination attempt, he briefly visits Heaven where a divine court judges him unworthy. Korda decides to mend some of his ways, but he also needs an heir. He has nine sons, some adopted and maybe a few biological, but they are a den of vipers. Anderson likes reoccurring jokes and this film has a good one involving errant arrows, but the bottom line is that he doesn’t plan to leave anything to his sons. His choice of heir is daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter) from the first of his numerous wives. One small problem: Liesl is a nun with whom he has had little contact since she was five and Zsa-Zsa is rumored to have killed her mother (Charlotte Gainsborough). Liesel professes commitment to the church, though she’s open to trying some decidedly secular things. Currently she is being tutored by Bjorn (Michael Cera), a putative Norwegian entomologist.

 

At this point Anderson switches to the episodic narrative for which he is known. Zsa-Zsa has a rather unholy plan to alter the economy of Phoenicia in a way that will deplete most of his assets, though it entails using slave labor in Phoenicia. His adversaries include a government program (Excalibur) that wants to shut him down, and virtually all of his investors and business partners who’d like to do the same or worse. Unbeknown to them is that Korda’s “scheme” is virtually the same, though it involves getting them to invest in his Phoenician economic scheme without telling them of the changes he has made.

 

One by one Zsa-Zsa confronts them, including: Marseilles Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a gangster; Californians Leland and Reagan (think railroad baron Leland Stanford and free marketeer Ronald Reagan); Marty (Jeffrey Wright), an East Coast business man; his half-brother Nubar (an unrecognizable Bendict Cumberbatch), and others. Anderson ends these dealings with a trick that’s perhaps lamer than Monty Python’s tactic of pronouncing a sketch “too silly” and moving on. Several of these encounters are quite funny, but as is true of much “sketch” comedy–and this is what it is–the confrontations vary in humor and usefulness in advancing the narrative.

 

Cera’s performance seems to have caught the attention of many reviewers, thought I’d judge Cumberbatch’s role as weightier and more significant. Anderson also gives cameo roles to other A and B+ list actors: F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, and Scarlett Johansson. For the record, Bill Murray (perhaps Anderson’s favorite) plays God. Such a stuffed cast isn’t needed for the small roles many of them play and it serves mainly to add chaos to the storyline.

 

The good news is that there are some terrific zingers, journeys into surrealism (tinged with steam punk), and laugh-out-loud moments in The Phoenician Scheme. Del Toro is terrific as the world-weary Korda and Threapleton is droll in the way Murray used to be when he played leads in Anderson films. In all, it’s worth a look. It’s also worth adding your name to the “Hire an Editor and Script Doctor” petition I’d happily circulate.

 

Rob Weir

 

You Won’t Get Bored in Bordeaux

 

 

I confess that before we booked a tour to the Perigord regions (aka the Dordogne  or the Périgueux) I seldom thought of the French city of Bordeaux. I vaguely knew that Celts lived there in the third century B.C. and that Julius Caesar conquered them centuries later. Four centuries of Roman rule gave way to the Gauls (also Celts) of the early Middle Ages. Back in the days when I was studying medieval history I learned that Bordeaux was the principal town of Aquitaine and that 14-year-old Eleanor became the Duchess of Aquitaine in 1137, then Queen of France. When Louis VII of France had their marriage annulled* in 1152, Eleanor married King Henry II of England and Aquitaine became part of the English crown. And so it remained until after the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453 when it reverted back to France.

 

I then put Bordeaux out of mind unless I saw the name on bottles of red wine. Bordeaux and Burgundy wines are considered among the world’s best. (The difference is that most Burgundies are single varietals–just one type of grape–whereas those from Bordeaux are mixed, usually Merlot and one or two other grapes.) Bordeaux is still a major wine exporter for some 7,000 regional vintners, but it’s also a lively city whose metropolitan population has sprawled to 1.3 million. (The city proper is about 300,000 with immigrants coming in daily, many from Paris.) It has been a university town since 1441, and a major trading center even longer. The Garonne River is muddy and wide in the city as its mouth is just 15 miles away. On its banks approximately center city lies the impressive and photogenic 18^th century Palais de la Bourse (stock exchange), a testament to Bordeaux’s wealth. These days wine, retail, education, and tourism drive the economy. The nearby Grande Théâtre is another example of the city’s 18^th century “golden age,” as are several lavishly appointed cathedrals and churches. It was also a slave trade now coming to grips with its role in that horrific practice.

 

Bordeaux has seen upheavals, which is why there are a reputed 362 monuments in the city. Depending upon whom you ask, the French Revolution or the two world wars were the most traumatic occurences in the city. Given that Bordeaux has several squares and parks named for socialists, the man for whom the guillotine is named graduated from the university, and many abolitionists were socialists, I’d say the Revolution was popular here. (The socialist party tends to get a lot of votes in Bordeaux!)

 

Architectural historians can have a field day in Bordeaux. It has several impressive medieval gates and a well-preserved medieval quarter, the waterfront is mostly 18^th century, and Rue St. Catharine is France’s longest pedestrian shopping precinct (1.2 km). But there is also a district with Le Corbusier buildings, and lots of concrete brutalism away from the center, including the extraordinarily ugly brutalist shopping mall called Mériadeck in the hotel precinct. Why people go there is a mystery given how many shopping options exist in the center–everything from Monsieur T-Shirt to Galeries Lafayette.

 

We only had time to check out several museums: Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Museum of Aquitaine, and Cité du Vin. The latter is an interactive look at wine around the world–much preferrable to Atlanta’s Coca Cola World if you ask me. Its quirky home is supposed to resemble wine being swirled in a glass, but it looks more like a giant glass boot! But you can learn a lot about wine, get a sample at the top, and be treated to an aerial view of Bordeaux.

 

A final thing to mention is Bordeaux’s excellent public transportation. It has a TGV fast train to Paris (two hours), taxis, buses, and a four-line light rail tram system. Line A runs the whole way out to the airport and you can take its slower ride into the city for a          few Euros as opposed to the 25-30 Euros you’d spend for a cab.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

* Medieval marriages were almost always about land, not love. The Catholic Church did/does not sanction divorce, so Louis contrived the excuse that he and Eleanor were too closely related and petitioned for annulment. That’s weird as the couple had two daughters, which would mean they were guilty of incest. The real reason was that Louis wanted a male heir. Don’t blame Eleanor; she bore five sons for Henry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild Dark Shore a Mesmerizing Tale of Climate Change, Etc.

 

 

 

Wild Dark Shore (2025)

By Charlotte McConaghy

Flatiron Books, 298 pages.

★★★★★

 

It’s hard to classify Wild Dark Shore, the latest novel from Australian author Charlotte McConaghy. Is it a climate change apocalypse tale, a family saga, a romance, a mystery, a series of moral dilemmas, or a thriller? All of these, but did I mention ghosts? It’s filled with mostly metaphorical ones, but some in that liminal “not sure” category. McConaghy writes in short paragraphs and has multiple narrators–including those who have died–but it’s a tribute to her skill that we never get lost in her unorthodox constructions.

 

The setting in Shearwater Island, which is more than remote. Next stop, Antarctica. (Her model was Macquarie Island, halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.) It is where the Salt family lives in an old lighthouse: Dominic (“Dom”) and his three children:

Raff (18), Fen (17), and Orly (9). Dom’s wife Claire died in childbirth nine years earlier as her  youngest son Orly came into the world. Dom never recovered from her death and “speaks” with Claire every day. His collection of Claire’s items became a veritable shrine.

 

The population of Shearwater was cut in half. It was also the home to a research team headed by Hank Jones, an NYU professor, who ran a seedbank there. With climate change ravaging the globe, his team of scientists–Naija, and brothers Alex and Tom–have set up a seed repository for whatever survives of humankind. The team is now dead or presumed so after a storm washed away Hank’s cabin and an inflatable Zodiac carrying Naija and Tom. Alex died earlier and is buried on the island. The biggest population of Shearwater are seals and penguins who, ironically, cavort on the beach near vats once used by traders to render them into oil.

 

For reasons McConaghy holds onto until near the end, Dom’s daughter Fen refuses to live in the lighthouse. She’s happiest among the marine animals, “speaks” to the dead ones, and resides in a fishing shack on the beach. It is from there that she spies a body floating in the tide, swims out to retrieve it, and is surprised to find a faint pulse. The population of Shearwater is about to grow by one; she is Rowan, who came to be with her husband: Hank. Like everyone else on Shearwater, she harbors a secret. Raff is probably dyslexic, but holds within him a lot of unresolved anger and heartache. We learn that another brother, River, is dead but McConaghy holds onto that secret as well.

 

Life on the island centers around Dom, whose many skills keep things in working order through improvisation and jerry rigging, but not even he can fix the radios sabotaged by one of the researchers who went berserk. Dom also controls his children’s education and stretches food supplies until naval officers return to the island. Hopefully Rowan’s presence will not exhaust the larder. She was badly injured when her boat wrecked and you can imagine how rudimentary her emergency surgery was. As she recovers Rowan begins to explore the island and helps out. Young Orly takes a shine to her and Dom struggles with his own attraction to her.

 

You could think of Wild Dark Shore as a version of “Survivor” without cameras and lifelines. Dom is sturdy and handy, but he’s not exactly Mr. Empathy–his answer to Raff’s anger is send him up to the lantern room to hit a punching bag–and he’s certainly not attuned to Fen’s heartaches given his inadequacy to grasp his own. Moreover, the waters are rising, storms are growing more fierce, and the beach and island are crumbling away. Staying isn’t an option, but all talk of the future seems more wishful and perfunctory than realistic.

 

Wild Dark Shore plays out in ways that you might anticipate, but solving that mystery might not be the point. Remember that the family surname is Salt, a preservative. In the game of survival, who gets chosen or has the resources to do so? In a tale of secrets, which ones leak out and how do they matter? In many ways, everything in the novel, including its characters, animals, and the island is a metaphor. The concept of rewilding is much discussed, but is the seed bank an unrealistic conceit? As I read this gripping work, I pondered climate change and ghosts. Is this how it all ends?

 

Rob Weir