Flasz On Film

Look, I try to play nice whenever I can and if I can avoid it, I’d rather not write a block of text where I just go dismissing a movie and driving it into the ground scene by scene, aspect by aspect. I’d much rather come up with a clever metaphor or a device I could use to wrap a one-star review around so that it at least would be interesting for me to write, and hopefully interesting for you to read.  

But I think at this point I am out of ammo. When it comes to the work of Wes Anderson, I believe I may have run out of edgy similes and metaphorical ideas to sugarcoat my negative thoughts with. In fact, I had to reach back and re-read some of my old writing to make sure I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel and end up repeating myself because I have already compared his recent work to a musician playing with knobs on his amplifier and pushing gain too high (The French Dispatch) and a banana of questionable ripeness (Asteroid City). I think I might have also suggested that if we trained a deep learning model on his work, what it’d come up with wouldn’t be too far off where his actual movies are now on the occasion of writing about that movie, too.  

Therefore, I don’t honestly know if there is an avenue I can pursue here without running the risk of—ironically enough—doing exactly what I have been accusing Wes Anderson of doing these past few years, which is repeating myself. However, thinking in real time now, I might actually be able to swing this because I do enjoy the kind of self-aware comedy that might come out of this experiment, so I might as well turn whatever this is into a piece of meta-aware commentary on Wes Anderson’s new movie titled The Phoenician Scheme because if you read my previous articles on the subject, you might feel exactly how I’m feeling now. That this movie, and by extension my writing on it, is simply an exercise in more of the same with very little added value.  

Nevertheless—and here’s my writer’s ego peering through the spaces between words—I think I’ve had way more fun re-reading my own words on the recent Wes Anderson movies than I had watching any of them. Including this one.  

But then again, and this is also something I remember remarking upon, there will be people who do in fact get a lot out of The Phoenician Scheme or any of the more recent Wes Anderson gigs. I suppose these may be folks who just resonate with these movies better than I do or those who have come to know Wes Anderson only in the last ten years or so and for whom the movies he makes now are just movies he makes. I, on the other hand, distinctly remember watching Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums just as I remember observing his slow and recursive process of turning his movies into live-action equivalents of stop-motion animated movies serving as ornate dioramas and intricate Rube Goldberg machines, the best of which to this day remains The Grand Budapest Hotel in my humble opinion.  

Maybe I’m just not somebody who ought to be paid attention to when it comes to Wes Anderson’s works because his movies are just not for me. Perhaps he is after all best described as a filmmaker comp to a brutal death metal band that plays a very specific and highly constrained genre of extremely inaccessible music that only small subsections of the public can digest and derive pleasure from listening. Therefore, there’s no use listening to anyone who simply doesn’t have the patience or the discipline to see through what he perceives as cacophonous noise and identify the ways in which the new album of this particular band differs from all the others.

Look, my taste in music is eclectic and also skewed towards weird genres enough for me to have a favourite Swedish death metal act and to understand that some bands rarely veer outside of their chosen niches, and that their fans expect nothing more than for them to do more of the same every time they lock themselves in a studio to record an album. Maybe rabidly zealous Anderson stalwarts place the same expectations on this filmmaker and I’m simply out of step with the culture at large with my stupid hopes that this guy would one day either get over himself and move on from this clearly idiosyncratic phase of his artistic life and make a movie that looks like nothing he’d done before. Because at this point I am at a loss as I struggle to differentiate between The Phoenician Scheme and Asteroid City just like an unseasoned music critic would fail to distinguish between different albums released by Nile or Cannibal Corpse. 

For all I care, Anderson’s newest stint is still an ensemble medley of extremely nuanced idiosyncratic humour with Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton (who looks like a spitting image of her mother Kate Winslet), Michael Cera with a respectably researched Swedish accent, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Rupert Friend, Benedict Cumberbatch and, of course, Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe. That’s just to name a few. I’m sure I missed out on identifying at least a dozen other A-listers who happened to roll through the set at one point or another, because at this point, being in the frame in at least one (if not a few) Wes Anderson movie is a bucket list item for the best part of the Hollywood establishment.  

So, the movie concerns a business magnate named Zsa-Zsa Korda (that’s Del Toro) who appoints his estranged daughter (that’s Mia Threapleton) as his sole heir even though she is a novitiate nun (of course) and that he has nine other sons. Korda survives several attempts at his life by various organizations as he travels the world with his daughter and a Swedish tutor (that’s Cera) and attempts to launch a bunch of infrastructure projects in a fictitious country of Phoenicia. And as you can imagine, the journey is dense with Wes Anderson’s typical attempts at absurdism, ornate iconography, ludicrous plotting and bombastically deadpan line deliveries from all involved. If you’ve seen Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, or literally anything Anderson has made between 2012 and now, you can have a good idea what to expect because the movie doesn’t stray from the beaten path even for a single millisecond. The jokes are there, and clever and sassy as they are, few things are funny on the umpteenth attempt. It’s really all the same with a different dressing. Like that brutal death metal band, he is religiously devoted to the form he’s adopted, as though his overarching mission was to turn his name into a genre. Which I think at this point is safe to say is a mission accomplished. 

But as I said all along, I am out of clever metaphors, I think. This man’s work is a banana past its use-by date. He’s a guitarist who’s fallen in love with his fuzz pedal against the wishes of all his bandmates. He’s a bottle rocket without a bottle. He’s Marge Simpson with that Chanel dress repurposed into a new outfit so many times it’s about to fall apart. A Rube Goldberg machine designed to find the most intricate and obnoxiously complex way to butter a toast. A brutal death metal album full of more-of-the-same songs. At least that’s what I think.  

But I am sure that if you can look past all what drives me up the wall and you somehow—in a bout of masochistic fit—derive pleasure from The Phoenician Scheme, you might be able to see it as a veiled metaphor for the process of putting a movie together and having to scramble around the world and risk your life to get multiple parties aligned in support of your venture. You might even see it as a study on the Middle East, which is even more thinly veiled, to be perfectly honest. And you might even, just as was the case for Asteroid City, identify The Phoenician Scheme as a subtle study on fatherhood hidden under a thick layer of wesandersonian style. But to do that, you have to be a brutal death metal aficionado. Which I am not, unfortunately, despite my best intentions. 

But to add insult to injury—and also in full accordance with what I predicted a thousand words ago—now you can safely predict what I think about any new Wes Anderson movie. Just as I think that you’ve seen one and you’ve seen them all, you’ve read one of my ramblings, you’ve read them all too. Ironically, I am now a Wes Anderson of reviewing Wes Anderson: a writer who progressively disappears into the pile of his own metaphorical takes, each of which looks like a derivative of the one that came before it. And I have the gall to criticize the man while doing exactly what he’s doing. Thanks, Wes. You’ve made me look like a hypocrite. Five stars.