The Phoenician Scheme Review

Unless you are a film student or an Owen Wilson stan, you can skip Bottle Rocket. If you are either of those things, you can finish reading this later, go watch now. Anyone wondering, the two films I have never seen are Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. I enjoy stop-motion animation, I just never got around to them.

I don’t know how much screen time Benecio has in Scheme, but it feels like an hour and a half. That is not criticism, just that he’s in almost every scene, and while there is a decently large ensemble cast, it is a break away from the usual distribution of screen time that Wes gives his actors. Arrested Development and Super Bad are Michael Cera’s best work. He does exceptionally well here, too. Dare I say nobody is bad in this, as far as acting. If you are in this movie, you earned your royalty check, even if you are in it for two seconds.

I realize that music rights in TV and movies is a complex IP issue. For me, that kind of ruins projects. My wife and I watched Dawson’s Creek during the pandemic, which had replaced a decent chunk of the original music. It just wasn’t the same. I’ve heard that Wonder Years has issues with retaining the classic rock that made it so good. The music in Royal Tenenbaums is a big part of what makes it so damn good and Wes’s Magnus Opus. The idea of replacing those iconic tracks with random crappy music like twenty years from now is shuddering. The Phoenician Scheme uses classical pieces that are seemingly mostly public domain to create a unique score and music that adds tension effectively. I like it, but I like Ruby Tuesday better.

I can only imagine the budget and costume design Wes Anderson’s team has these days. Huge, I’d imagine. They use every penny effectively this time out. It is supposed to be 1950 and stylish. Both of those things jump off the screen. 10 out of 10.

The opening credits are wonderful. It is a great vertical shot of an ornate bathroom with amazing tile. I love tile. Use of color, objects in the room, and the general shape of the shot, are all fantastic. I could watch the credits with pretty much any text at any speed and just sit there reading attentively. It reminded me of a modern twist on those credits at the beginning that golden and silver age Hollywood had. Aces.

There is a ton of smoking in this movie. It is still somehow PG-13. I guess smoking is no longer an automatic R. There are also language and violence, nothing too graphic or profane, but enough that I kind of wonder what the ratings board was doing while they watched it. To me, it is a very soft R. But I go back and forth. Plus, I kind of hate it when people get all uppity about movie ratings. And it is probably the first time since Goodfellas and Thank You for Smoking where tobacco use actually substantially improved the quality of a movie.

The plot and tone of the movie are both good. While people betray and undermine each other all of the time in his movies, this was his first jaunt into espionage film. Overall, very good script, too. I do wish he and Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman would try comedy again. Like pure comedy, rather than witty comedy. But high brow comedy. Damn it. I just want to laugh more instead of saying “that’s funny” or “that’s clever” under my breath.

I’m generally familiar with the work of Woody Allen and Cameron Crowe. To me, Wes Anderson is similar to them in that he has a specific audience, more or less a specific age bracket, and he consistently delivers the goods to that audience. Now that I have seen the Phoenician Scheme, the countdown to the next Wes Anderson film can begin. The Phoenician Scheme: 8.5/10.