After the Covid pandemic, I had gotten out of the habit of going to the movies. For the past few years, the only times I actually went to the theater were to see huge franchise-type blockbusters — your Missions Impossible or Fasts and Furiouses — or movies my kids really wanted to see, which were similarly over-the-top — the kinds of spectacles that “needed” a screen the size of a city block and sound that reverberated through the cushions of the reclining seats. And these are fun for what they are (though I tend to forget what happened in any of these movies by the time I reach my car).
But the other day my wife and I went to see a “normal” movie — the new Wes Anderson film “The Phoenician Scheme” — and we loved it. Not just the film, which was a delight, but the experience of seeing a movie like this in the theater. I’ve enjoyed Anderson’s movies since I saw “Bottle Rocket” in high school, and “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” are all personal favorites. But he wasn’t the sort of filmmaker that made me think I needed to turn out to see him on the big screen. I had watched his most recent (post-pandemic) films — “The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City” — at home and really enjoyed them there. But I have to say, seeing “The Phoenician Scheme” on a big screen, in a theater with an impressive sound system, was absolutely worth the price of admission.
It reminded me a bit of going to a museum to see a work of art in person. Sure, I can see very clear images of the same painting online, and can even get a high-quality print of it and display it at my house, where I don’t need to battle crowds to enjoy it. But, while this can be very nice, it is not the same thing as being there in person.
It is no accident that I was thinking about painting while watching Anderson’s latest movie. It is, like all of his recent work: highly stylized. Nothing feels accidental or tossed off; all of the shots and set pieces are carefully, thoughtfully, masterfully arranged. I love this aspect of his work. Whenever I watch an Anderson movie, I feel that I am in assured hands — that the person who made this film knows exactly what he wants it to look like and what he wants it to say. But because it is so artfully designed, I often find myself simply enjoying the compositions, rather than being inspired by them to look deeper into what they represent.
This is my only, very slight, quibble with this film. The plot revolves around the arms dealer and industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who, after a series of near-death experiences, decides to recall his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) from the convent where he has stashed her since childhood so that she can learn the family business and become his official heir. The two of them spend most of the movie traveling from one business meeting to the next, as Korda tries to shore up the investors in his latest infrastructure scheme (a dam? a tunnel? both? It’s not entirely clear — at least on first viewing — what the scheme actually entails).
What they’re building is less important than how it all looks (which is immaculate). The film is delightful — cleverly written, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted — but it is also very much a movie with Important Ideas, and I do think that on the whole these ideas take a backseat to the mannered acting and the deliberate framing and the meticulous composition of the material. This, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I don’t need my movies to be about Important Ideas — but in a movie like this, where mortality and faith play such a central role in the narrative arc, I would have liked to see Anderson somehow move past the (very lovely) surfaces and spend more time exploring the depths.
Friend of the Jesuit Media Lab John Doughtery described this as Anderson’s most Catholic film, and this is certainly true. It features an overwhelming amount of Catholic imagery and plot points — we have a Catholic nun (or, more precisely, a novice) in a starring role, biblical place names, a sort of Cain and Abel brotherly rivalry, scenes set in heaven, prominently displayed crosses and rosary beads, repeated playings of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and Bill Murray, briefly, as God.
And perhaps even more significantly, the film itself is, very self-consciously, invested in the memento mori tradition. When the adult Liesl and Korda first meet to discuss his desire that she take over his business operations, he has a skull positioned very prominently on his mostly bare business table. Even at the end of the movie, when his circumstances have dramatically changed, the skull remains on his (smaller, more crowded) table, one of the few things from his old life that stays with him through it all.
The skull is an overt memento mori symbol, but the entire plot and structure of the film is almost one long memento mori as well. The movie opens with a character getting blown in half and Korda’s plane crashing into a corn field; he is presumed dead. He survives, barely, and this is just the first of multiple brushes with death we see him experience over the course of the film: he is shot in the chest, survives another plane crash, almost drowns in quicksand and is attacked with poison gas. After each near death encounter, Korda experiences a vision of the afterlife, where his soul is judged — and seemingly found wanting.
These visions are shot in black and white and stand out from the rest of the film in both tone and visual style. As a viewer, it’s not immediately clear what we are supposed to make of these moments. These abrupt, distinct scenes do reinforce the memento mori aspect of the film (particularly one striking moment where Korda is presenting an animal carcass as an offering to his dead wives; when he cuts it open, coins rather than blood come pouring out — showing that he has nothing of real substance to offer them, only money). But a memento mori works best when it leads the viewer to reflect on his or her own mortality, rather than just on the symbol itself. If there is a finger pointing at the gravestone, we want our attention focused on the grave and what it represents, not on the finger or how artfully the nails are painted. In “The Phoenician Scheme,” as much as I enjoyed it, I mostly felt like my attention was on the finger.
Which brings me back to my small but significant issue with the movie. Because it is so stylized, so mannered, my focus was repeatedly drawn back to the way Anderson presents his themes, rather than the themes themselves. While watching, and even in my conversations about the movie afterward, I spent more time focused on the style than on the substance.
But there is substance here. There is perhaps no pattern more common in Catholic art than the sinner who is initially blind to his faults, who comes (often through a moment of violence) to recognize his fallenness, repents and is saved (I wrote a whole book about how often we see this in American Catholic fiction!) — and Korda’s arc follows these beats faithfully. How convincing the audience finds his redemption will probably depend, at least in part, on how willing they are to forgive a rapacious industrialist whose redemptive act seems to entail using all his personal wealth to bring his (not entirely clear) infrastructure scheme to fruition. This might possibly lead to good outcomes for people in the region, but it definitely means that his (apparently pretty wicked) partners will end up profiting off of it.
In the end, Anderson seems to care more about how Korda repairs his personal relationships, with his daughter and his many sons, than how he makes amends for the sins of his past professional life. By the time the credits roll, he is no longer an arms dealing industrialist, so that is definitely an improvement, but in our current moment, when lots of the people in power seem to be both bad fathers and also willing to exploit the masses for personal gain, I’d certainly prefer they spend more time making amends for their crimes against humanity than their slights to their children.
So, although I really enjoyed this film, it didn’t feel like a work of art that is trying to do something to the viewer — which, for me, is the essence of Catholic art. It’s not just about using Catholic characters and iconography (which this movie definitely does), or even Catholic themes (and, again, this is a movie very explicitly about sin and conversion and redemption) — it’s about affecting the audience. For me, at least, “The Phoenician Scheme” was less successful at this than most works of art that I’d put in my own personal canon of Catholic masterpieces; I actually found it less emotionally affecting than most of Anderson’s best films.
But, even as I say this, I think back to how I felt as I left the theater — the immense pleasure that came from being there, part of a crowd, seeing it all unfold on the big screen. It really was a bit like taking a trip to a museum to see the art in person, where we might not know exactly what to make of a given painting, but we’re happy to have laid our eyes on it.
Which leads me to something I learned after the movie was over. This is a movie filled with artwork; Korda is a collector and prominently displays paintings by Renoir, Magritte and others throughout his palatial home. During the end credits, the artworks themselves get prominent placement, which surprised me — until I went online and learned that Anderson had gotten permission to include the original works of art in the movie. These were not, as I had assumed, realistic reproductions; they were the authentic masterpieces.
Surely, most of the audience will never know these are the real deal, so why are they here? Anderson smuggled these real presences into the film and didn’t go about drawing our attention to it, which has left me thinking. If I was oblivious to this, what else have I missed? Sometimes the real thing is mistaken for an ersatz version. Sometimes the beauty on display is authentic. We might not realize it, or recognize it in the moment, but it is there whether we are aware of it or not — and that truly is a spiritual, even Catholic, vision.