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The Phoenician Scheme Misses the Big Picture
While Wes Anderson’s attention to detail remains unparalleled, he seems to have lost the plot
Wes Anderson’s films are peppered with charismatic absentee parents: Gene Hackman bluffing his way back into his family’s lives for free housing in The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Murray gladly using the inheritance of the maybe-son he’s just met to finance his next documentary in The Life Aquatic, Anjelica Huston fleeing her husband and children for the Himalayas in The Darjeeling Limited. This film, set in 1956, hops between the Palazzo Korda, its protagonist’s cavernous mansion, and different quarters of Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, a vague Middle Eastern nation that’s depicted as an array of deserts, warring factions, and colonial outposts. If Anderson had any inclination to link his work to the present day, you could draw a line to various current oligarchs through Korda’s interest in fatherhood as a numbers game, or the way he spends his downtime on lessons from a tutor named Bjorn (Michael Cera, delightful), who’s hired to serve as a ’50s answer to an informational podcast.
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