Do you paint in crayon colors? Is your name Seijun Suzuki? We’re not in Japan, and we’re not blacklisting directors anymore—after all, if David O. Russell can get away with throwing the n-word around on set, isn’t everyone free? We have two Andersons: Wes and Paul Thomas. As the years go on, the former continues to steadily build a filmography much like Pedro Almodóvar’s or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s: pieces that will one day make a house. Some films are the windows and walls and doors, but others are basements and light switches and toilets; good and bad, they make a house. Paul Thomas Anderson, like Martin Scorsese, is afflicted with the attitude of the “Great Artist,” who, after a certain point (their late-30s), only make “major statements” with their films. Like Scorsese, Anderson will never toss one off or, for example, make a wild departure into the world of animation, or horror. They’re both classicists, studio filmmakers who could’ve plausibly worked in Classic Hollywood more so than most of their peers.
Wes Anderson, like Quentin Tarantino, never could’ve flourished in Classic Hollywood; they both would’ve been also-rans to people like Preston Sturges, Vincente Minnelli, and William Witney. Like Tarantino, Anderson has an immediately recognizable aesthetic, equally understood and misunderstood at a popular level, much like “Lynchian.” It’s true that not all Anderson films are like Fantastic Mr. Fox or Moonrise Kingdom, but to talk about dollhouses, cartoons, deadpanning, horror vacui, all of this is appropriate. Richard Brody and all the other church mice can cite this or that violent death or betrayal or heartbreak in an Anderson film, but the overview is impossible to deny: more and more, Anderson’s films recall New Yorker cartoons more than they do other movies, or even novels or plays.
The Phoenician Scheme is a stopgap movie, a rest after the precipitous rise from The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, to Asteroid City, all released in the last 11 years. With Tarantino near retirement and the other Anderson taking four or five years between films, Anderson is one of the only major American Generation X directors still building his house. Others were sidetracked or distracted at some point along the way: Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Solondz. Rather than nesting stories within stories, Anderson follows Benicio del Toro (as Zsa-Zsa Korda), his daughter played by Mia Threapleton, and a Swedish interloper played by Michael Cera. The Phoenician Scheme is an “espionage” movie, but it’s not a thriller, nor a drier procedural—it’s a Wes Anderson film. If you enjoy visiting his house, perhaps you’ll like this new window. Or doorknob.
Del Toro’s wild man is an entrepreneur, not quite Howard Hughes or Donald Trump, but in the same family. He’s confident and beyond arrogant, with delusions of invincibility: informed that a pack of dynamite is set to explode on his plane in 18 minutes, he reassures his friends that they’ll be landing in 10 minutes, so no need to even defuse the bomb. “If something gets in your way, flatten it” is the movie’s tagline and a motto handed down to Del Toro’s character from his father, another accumulator who, in a different film, may have been colored by echoes of Fred Trump; but Anderson’s basically uninterested in our current moment, whether his films take place in the present or the past. Asteroid City was widely hailed as uniquely moving and vulnerable for the director, with uncharacteristic commentary on the times (intimations of a virus). But all of that is lost under the rapid-fire staccato and deadpan delivery of the actors, just as the graphic violence and gore in The Phoenician Scheme is undercut by Anderson’s dollhouse mis-en-scène.
This isn’t disqualifying, but it does nothing to change the perception of Anderson as the King of Twee—not that he should try to change it or even care, he’s an enviable position as a filmmaker—and it’s easy for me to see why people like Joyce Carol Oates refer to his films as “cartoons.” Perhaps Jodie Foster as well, who Anderson has asked “three or four times” to be in one of his movies, and has turned him down every time. The Phoenician Scheme is his most “conventional” and “straightforward” film in over a decade, with a linear narrative and a more contained visual sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s still not the real world, not the world that The Royal Tenenbaums takes place in—is this all there is to Wes Anderson’s house?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits