The Phoenician Scheme: Benicio del Toro steals the show as a death-defying tycoon in Wes Anderson’s latest caper

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

After the new-world stargazing and settler ennui of Asteroid City (2023), Wes Anderson’s 12th feature turns back to the melting pot of the Near East: lands of plenty historically, culturally, geologically and in the imaginations of business raiders and storytellers. 

It is 1950, just five years before Asteroid City’s red-rock futurism, but the Arabian playground of The Phoenician Scheme gives us a Lawrentian hallucination of desert princes, colonialists and guerrilla fighters, stirred with Casablanca barkeeps, kibbutz pioneers and a prodigal playboy somewhere between Rasputin and Dr Strange. Most of all it gives us Anatole ‘Zsa Zsa’ Korda, a highflying, death-defying, uncontainable tycoon of no fixed abode, on a quest to conjure power and transport wonders and further fortune from the sands. 

After more than a decade of mostly ensemble dramas, Anderson here levers a top-dog protagonist who makes the patriarchs of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) like pipsqueaks. Written for Benicio del Toro, it’s a role on which Anderson builds the entire precarious edifice of his movie. We meet Korda in a pre-credits sequence 5,000 feet over the ‘Balkan Flatlands’, reading up on the patrons of the High Renaissance in a private aeroplane lounge, elegantly furnished in maroon and taupe. One explosion later and he is in a wheat-field, staggering bloodied into frame as a live television broadcast prematurely relays news of his death and life story: this is his sixth plane crash. 

A man of many enemies, he may be running out of lives; pushing a “vestigial organ” back into place, he remarks, is not as easy as it looks. Signs of mortality are mounting. On the material side of things, a secret council of bureaucrats (who serve as something of a Greek chorus) is conspiring to drive him out of business by gaming the price of ‘bashable rivets’; their end goal is his end. Korda is also having visions of a higher world: celestial antechambers of a somewhat Orthodox hue, filmed in black-and-white tableaux somewhere between Powell-Pressburger and Parajanov, with Willem Dafoe wandering about in furs and antlers and Bill Murray trying on God’s bushy beard for size. 

Most pressingly, the numbers do not add up on Korda’s grandiose plan to speed the wheels of commerce with a lattice of canals, rail tunnels and power plants in the nation of Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, with a five percent return over 150 years for himself. To close the gap, he needs to talk his array of investors – “bankers, industrialists, black market syndicalists” – into trimming their own terms. And to accompany him, for reasons kept close to his chest, he summons his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton, doing Claudette Colbert-style deadpan with a bob and a cut-glass English accent) to sign on as his sole inheritor, on a trial basis. That she is a trainee nun is of passing bemusement to him; that she’s been told he murdered her mother, one of his three late wives, is a more persisting source of distrust. 

And so launches a mad caper, a kooky jape, a careering divertissement, an escapade of high-wire whimsy (there are times when the bureaucrat council seems to be reciting the thesaurus). It might be Anderson’s densest confection yet; it’s certainly his most headlong and action-packed, with Korda embodying not so much the great man as the superman theory of cinema on his entrepreneurial mission impossible. (A cockpit shot evoking Top Gun had me wondering when he might fold Tom Cruise into his ever-growing stock company.) 

One of Anderson’s special effects is his dialogue; after the practice of the breathless readings in his 2023 short Roald Dahl adaptation The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, he sets this film’s at breakneck, screwball speed, another aspect that evokes older eras with some nostalgia, along with the picaresque plot calls. Preston Sturges fans will feel on sure ground with Michael Cera’s Swedish entomology tutor turned replacement PA, Bjorn. 

Across the four corners of Phoenicia, we also meet Riz Ahmed’s local prince, Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston’s American jock businessmen, Mathieu Amalric’s irascible expat nightclub owner, Richard Ayoade’s amiable freedom fighter, Jeffrey Wright’s salty sea boss and Scarlett Johansson’s eastern European kibbutznik, cousin Hilda. (These character sketches are of variable depth.) And at the end of the line we meet Benedict Cumberbatch’s devilish Uncle Nubar, sporting an ornate beard and eyebrows reminiscent of the ArmenianBritish magnate Nubar Gulbenkian, son of Calouste Gulbenkian, the original Mr Five Per Cent and deviser of the 1928 ‘Red Line’ cartel exploiting Arabian oil. 

Along with his collector’s approach to star casting, Anderson’s other special effect is, of course, his mise en scène: the pristine framing and tracking and panning around Adam Stockhausen’s exquisite production design and props by a new cinematography recruit, Bruno Delbonnel. From Korda’s array of annotated contract-storage shoeboxes, budget scorecards and geographic chapter titles that introduce each episode to the power-station diorama and extravagant stop-off constructions we see en route, the film is its own testament to the glories of human engineering and the magic of invention, another case in point of Orson Welles’s “greatest train set a boy ever had”. And yet in a couple of salient late shots Anderson shakes up his camerawork, throws equilibrium to the wind and lets in just a shard of real light. 

How to judge Korda, this bullheaded tyrant with a dream and a will? Anderson doesn’t revere him but does love him, and believes in redemption, as well as a clean change of clothes. It’s telling that there is no oil in this story of Gulf development and exploitation (even Tintin acknowledged the black gold); that doesn’t wash out so well. The film spurns two pessimistic parables we tell of the powerful: the Icarus who sabotages himself, and the scorpion who stings the frogs beneath him. There is blood, bad blood, in The Phoenician Scheme, but there are also transfusions, and regeneration.

► The Phoenician Scheme is in UK cinemas 23 May.