Succession by Fisher-Price: "The Phoenician Scheme"

Hardcore Wes Anderson devotees have been quiet on The Phoenician Scheme, though the film could hardly have helped its cause by launching at Cannes, traditional site of new and newly expansive cinematic visions. By contrast, TPS is nothing if not Anderson by numbers: poky Academy frame, limited, doll's-house worldview, trifling caper plot, flatly written and spoken dialogue, all set in the usual high-end production design and sold to us as some exotic delicacy, the comedy without laughs. Yet my eyebrows and expectations were momentarily raised by a prologue that gets some blood on the walls of these ultra-curated, ever-rectilinear frames: the opening scene describes the first of several assassination attempts, in this instance a bomb that blows a hole in the private jet of tyrannical industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro). Set over the course of 1950, that banner year for American capitalism, The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Goes Business, a period film in which this artful writer-director offers his own sideways take on the cutthroat back-in-the-headlines dealings of Succession, Trump et al. The true believers will doubtless thrill to see their idol storming the boardroom to unlock a further set of rules, contracts, tchotchkes within boxes, boxes within boxes, eccentric hangers-on and arcane onscreen statistics. Even by this director's recent standards, though, TPS is several thousand feet of trivia, another layer of fluff painstakingly extracted from the navel of The Royal Tenenbaums.

What the new film does provide, however, is a useful, 100-minute lull in which we might reflect upon the authorial tradeoffs that have been necessary to convert a once-promising comic outlook into a recognisable, profitable, now mostly sterile brand. Anderson has built enough of a customer base to justify banging another of these out every twelve-to-24 months, but he's long since run out of compelling situations, interesting characters (rather than agglomerations of quirks) and solid jokes. TPS has one joke at its disposal, really - those leftfield assassination attempts - and it's one that could perhaps have caught fire with some pace behind or heat underneath it. Instead, tweezered into their display case and then duplicated with kid gloves, pinky finger extended, each reiteration here lands with a dull, silence-inducing splat. Anderson is just about the last comedy director at large in America, and he's survived by turning Screen Two of the Odeon into a library. The compensation offered for this flimsy product is a heavyweight line-up of endorsing celebrities. (As with The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, TPS makes for a better billboard than it does a film.) As Korda's estranged daughter and potential heiress, a wimple-clad Mia Threapleton is allowed to retain her British accent and some of her own cadences; everybody else is obliged to don the uniform and adopt the policies of WesCorp, to impersonate the words and gestures of the players in previous Anderson films. Any surprise at seeing Richard Ayoade pop up in this milieu is dulled by the inevitability of seeing Richard Ayoade pop up in this milieu; it's amazing Anderson hadn't recruited him before Covid, although you suspect Ayoade might wish the director had made the call twenty years ago. If you've bought shares in this stock, fine, have at it again; but Anderson shows no sign of wanting or needing to expand his customer base. The films remain newsletters composed in a treehouse, possibly using one of the film's tie-in "bespoke writing implements" (pens, those of us on the ground call them), and dispatched to the faithful. I went in wondering whether Branderson is to the aspirant bohemians of the Left what MAGA is to the American Right, an airtight personality cult inexplicable to anyone looking on unamused from the other side of the pond; I left thinking of late-period Woody Allen, and how a hardened accumulation of compulsions, fetishes and tics is really no vision for a truly popular cinema. Sell, sell, sell.

The Phoenician Scheme is now showing in selected cinemas.