Wes Anderson takes his quirkiness ‘to a whole new level’

Featuring Benicio Del Toro, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson and many more, the director’s latest A-lister-filled farce has premiered at Cannes – and it’s daft but fun.

Just when you think that Wes Anderson can’t get any more Wes Anderson-ish, he makes a film which takes Wes Anderson-ishness to a whole new level, packing in yet more of the quirks that have become his trademarks: the symmetrical tableaux, the brightly coloured, crisply pressed costumes, the deadpan delivery of proudly artificial dialogue by an ensemble of stars, many of whom are regulars (yes, Bill Murray does appear). Whether viewers of his latest offbeat comedy are Anderson aficionados or Wes-sceptics, they’re bound to wonder if the writer-director will ever attempt a project that isn’t quite so recognisable.

The good news is that The Phoenician Scheme is one of Anderson’s funnier films, with a commitment to knockabout zaniness which lets you smile at the Anderson-ishness rather than simply roll your eyes at it. The opening sequence, especially, is a madcap treat. Benicio del Toro is introduced as Zsa-zsa Korda, an amoral 1950s businessman who seems to have been inspired by the super-rich likes of William Randolph Hearst, J Paul Getty, Aristotle Onassis and Howard Hughes – and who bears a certain resemblance to the patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums, too. He’s first seen puffing a cigar on his private jet, and then surviving one of the assassination attempts that are a regular part of his life – and his miraculous escape has enough energy to make you giddy.

After that, though, the film quickly comes down to earth. Back in his palatial villa, Korda has a meeting with his 20-year-old daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton). She is a novitiate nun he hasn’t seen in years, but he nonetheless wants her – and not one of his nine sons – to inherit the fortune he has made from arms dealing and profiteering, among other unsavoury practices. He also wants her to help him with his latest and greatest venture, a massive infrastructure scheme involving a railway and a dam in a Middle Eastern desert. Liesl isn’t interested, but she does want to investigate the rumour that Korda murdered her mother, one of his three wives, so she agrees to hang around.

The trouble is that the infrastructure scheme has been sabotaged by a secret agent (Rupert Friend) working for all the governments around the world that loathe Korda. Suddenly short of the funding required, he has to fly across the region, renegotiating contracts with the aid of Liesl and his nerdy new Norwegian secretary, Bjorn (a lovably goofy Michael Cera, who could have been born to be in a Wes Anderson film).

Korda plays basketball with two railway tycoons (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston) and a prince (Riz Ahmed); he is held at gunpoint alongside a nightclub impresario (Mathieu Amalric); he shares a blood transfusion with a shipping magnate (Jeffrey Wright); and he proposes to his second cousin (Scarlett Johansson). Along the way, he narrowly avoids being assassinated: every time he has a near-death experience, he visits a black-and-white heaven, where God and the angels are played by Murray, F Murray Abraham and Willem Dafoe.

There are glimmers of emotion here and there. On one level, The Phoenician Scheme is about a heartless man learning to be a better person by spending time with his determined daughter. But on another level, the film is about… well, it’s hard to say. The way that wealthy industrialists profit from exploiting others could hardly be a more resonant topic at the moment, but Anderson doesn’t delve too deeply into the consequences of Korda’s decades of conniving. He has made a light, whimsical, but slow and talky farce which is episodic in its structure, reliant on catchphrases for its humour, and so daft in its contrivances that the cast and crew might have been making it up as they went along. It’s one of the ironies of Anderson’s films: in many respects they are planned with obsessive attention to detail, and yet the plot of The Phoenician Scheme could have been scribbled on the back of the envelope in the small hours of the morning. It’s good fun, but unless your tolerance for the director’s idiosyncrasies is stratospherically high, the chances are that the story will seem too random for you to care about by the halfway point.

Things perk up later with a Tom-and-Jerry style fight between Korda and his malicious half-brother, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with a stick-on beard. But the slapstick does serve as a final admission that this nonsense shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Some directors boast that they make the films that they want to see, and they don’t care about pleasing anyone else. In the case of The Phoenician Scheme, it feels as if Anderson and his team were enjoying it more than audiences ever will.

★★★☆☆