Spoilers ahead for the ending of The Phoenician Scheme.
Redemption is possible for billionaires — or at least it is for Zsa-Zsa Korda, the arms dealer and ruthless titan of industry at the center of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme. When we meet Zsa-Zsa (a beautifully weathered Benicio del Toro), he has just survived yet another assassination attempt and walked away from his sixth plane crash. He’s a force of nature, made unkillable by the same relentlessness that allowed him to build his empire. (“If something gets in your way, flatten it,” his father taught him.) Lately, hallucinations of the afterlife keep reminding Zsa-Zsa the end is inevitable, so he sets out to do what all great men must: secure funding for a legacy-defining series of infrastructure projects across the Middle East. He enlists the help of his estranged daughter, a nun-in-training named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), whom he’s testing out as his potential heir. As the pair jet from one negotiation to the next, they inevitably learn from each other, though their arcs are mismatched in scope. Liesl realizes nun life isn’t for her and starts to accept aspects of her father, while Zsa-Zsa has to learn no less than the difference between right and wrong. (He doesn’t believe slave labor is bad until he’s told so by God himself.) After battling capitalism incarnate in the form of his brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Zsa-Zsa bankrolls the infrastructure projects on his own, ridding himself of his immense wealth and instead choosing to run a restaurant with Liesl. It’s an optimistic ending for a terrible guy, and one that almost literally tears the film apart in its final stretch as it grapples with offering forgiveness to someone who doesn’t deserve it.
In Anderson’s recent output, there’s a tension between his style growing more ornate and self-contained even as his subject matter feels increasingly ripped from the headlines, as Bilge Ebiri wrote in his recent profile of the filmmaker. Watching Phoenician Scheme, it’s impossible not to see hints of our beloved American oligarchs in Zsa-Zsa — from his ambivalence about causing mass suffering to the fact that he keeps nine extra sons around just in case one of them turns out to be Einstein. The film’s plot, too, strikes some uncomfortably familiar chords: As Zsa-Zsa flies around the world meeting with disgruntled investors, the fate of his infrastructure projects — and thus the day-to-day lives of millions of people — rests on the outcome of petty disputes between a handful of billionaires. Of course, in a Wes Anderson film, those feuds are resolved through things like a very mannered game of basketball and a quippy standoff involving a hand grenade. (In one of the film’s better recurring gags, Zsa-Zsa hauls a box of grenades along with him to politely hand out as party favors. “Care for a hand grenade?”)
Even as an acidic view on current events bleeds into the manicured world of the film, Anderson can’t help but love his protagonist. In his original conception of Zsa-Zsa, Anderson told The Atlantic he imagined a “ruthless, brutal, unkillable businessman” who “is going to do a lot of damage to not just the people around him, but the world at large, in his own interest.” That version of Zsa-Zsa — modeled after mid-century tycoons like oil middleman Calouste Gulbenkian — clearly made it into the movie, but not without being significantly softened along the way. In all fairness, it’s difficult to imagine Anderson ever being too hard on a character who is as ruthlessly tasteful and well cultivated as Zsa-Zsa. (“Don’t buy good pictures,” he instructs one of his sub-Einstein-intellect sons, who is perplexed by a painting on his wall. “Buy masterpieces.”)
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If Anderson goes easy on Zsa-Zsa by giving him the capacity for redemption, he still makes him work for it. The film is, in part, about recognizing aspects of yourself in other members of your family and learning to either accept that similarity or change it. Until its climax, the specter hanging over Zsa-Zsa is Nubar, a fellow arms-dealing magnate who may or may not have killed Liesl’s mother. “He’s not human,” Zsa-Zsa says repeatedly. “He’s biblical,” as if stating the fact that Nubar’s cruelty surpassing his own absolves him somehow. When they do finally meet onscreen, the joke is that Nubar turns out to be almost literally inhuman, with serpentine eyes and ladder-splitting strength. He’s an evil so pure that he obviously has to be destroyed, and the film positions Zsa-Zsa’s climactic fight with him as an opportunity to vanquish whatever bottomless capitalist hunger remains in himself.
It all seems like Anderson is setting up an easy out — dumping Zsa-Zsa’s shortcomings into a physical manifestation of evil so he can slay them all in one go. But when the two make contact in their fight, the film’s visual language briefly ruptures as Anderson switches to some genuinely jarring handheld work, filming the two actors from below and then in alternating close-ups as they do a kind of twinned dance, the camera twisting and turning along with them. (For the Tenet fans, it’s sort of Anderson’s version of the Protagonist fighting his inverted self.) The film itself seems to be rejecting the idea that redemption could be this simple, and indeed, it takes a hand grenade and a biblical flood to dispose of Nubar. A duel of the fates with the worst version of himself, it turns out, is just enough to make a ruthless tycoon like Zsa-Zsa change his ways. After sacrificing his wealth to fund his (ultimately underwhelming) infrastructure projects, he finally becomes something approximating a real parent — completing the same arc as many an Anderson bad parent before him, from Royal Tenenbaum to Patricia in Darjeeling Limited. (Those parents’ crimes, however traumatizing they may have been for their children, never included slave labor, as far as we know.) Given enough brushes with death, redemption is possible for at least one billionaire, according to Anderson. But if you come across a Nubar, you gotta blow that guy up. Care for a hand grenade?
