What To Make Of Wes Anderson's 'The Phoenician Scheme' And Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead'
#322: "The Phoenician Scheme," "Mountainhead," "28 Days Later," "Nickel Boys"
Edition 322:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: A new Wes Anderson movie is always an occasion to celebrate, even if the latest left me scratching my head. Jesse Armstrong made a movie of the moment, and it’s about time I got my eyes on the cult classic-turned-franchise of 28 Days Later. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” brace yourselves for the return of the Wicked hive.
The Phoenician Scheme
Early in Wes Anderson’s career, his dollhouse style was damned with the feigned praise of a single word: “twee.”
His filmmaking signatures — symmetrical framing, pastel colors, quirky or off-beat characters, dead pan delivery, intricate set design — went hand-in-hand with storytelling that many people saw as juvenile and even saccharine. Movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox and his masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel, cemented a reputation even if it was not entirely deserved (A Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou all the way back to The Royal Tenenbaums are major downers).
Now in his 50s, he is clearly trying to mature his material a bit, a move that I think many people missed in 2023’s Asteroid City — which stacked artifice upon artifice and could only really be understood after repeat viewings.
The laziest criticism is to say The Phoenician Scheme is more of the same from one of Hollywood’s preeminent stylists. Gorgeously decorated sets and immaculately framed shots dance across the fictionalized, mid-century, Europe-esque territory of Phoenicia, where Benicio Del Toro’s protagonist is organizing a very complicated, multilevel infrastructure plan to control all of the territory’s commerce for the next 100 years, which he plans to hand off to his daughter along with the rest of his corporate empire.
Any attempt to make sense of what happens after that initial premise will take immense effort, as the story is complex and fast-paced and doesn’t slow down to explain itself. I personally got lost in the complex web of plot and characters — all of which are played by recognizable actors like Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Murray, Michael Cera, Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Wright etc., and thus demand individual consideration.
But this is, essentially, Wes Anderson’s version of There Will Be Blood, an ambitious story about capitalism, ambition, and generational trauma. Of course there are moments of ridiculousness and levity — Del Toro, Hanks and Cranston settle a business dispute with an impromptu game of H-O-R-S-E basketball — but a viewer can feel the filmmaker straining a bit to reach toward more grandiose themes.
Considering my somewhat lukeworm reception to Asteroid City the first time I saw it and my rapturous reappraisal on a second watch, I hesitate to call this movie one of Anderson’s worst efforts to date. I didn’t get it, but any movie that is so precisely and specifically made is likely hiding some secret genius.
Still, as I once grappled with, I don’t think a movie should HAVE to be watched twice in order to be understood or appreciated.
Something New
Mountainhead (HBO Max): Jesse Armstrong’s authorial signature is almost as noticeable in his material as Wes Anderson’s, though their aesthetics could not be more different. Anyone who watched “Succession” will feel very at home in the world of Mountainhead, with its black SUVs and green juices, a contained story about four billionaire-types holed up in a palatial ski lodge in Utah for a weekend of revelry as the world descends into utter chaos around them.
Armstrong’s writing is sharp and acerbic, and he pulls no punches with his opinions on the plutocrat class — he thinks these people are megalomaniacal, buffoonish, and entirely insulated from the consequences of the real world.
Whether or not this movie makes you laugh, as it’s intended to, depends on just how accurate you think that point of view is, and how dangerous you think it might be for the world. My laughter was mostly the nervous kind, since the global meltdown portrayed in the movie feels like it could easily happen…tomorrow.
Apparently Armstrong wrote and directed and wrapped this entire project in six weeks, beginning after the election in November, and it’s a really interesting experiment of what movies can be with modern technology, releasing six months after you come up with an idea.
It feels fresh in a way most movies don’t, but the flip-side of that timeline is that what’s on screen looks and feels indistinguishable from television. The real question is whether people care about that, especially when you get four really talented actors in a room together — Steve Carrell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef and Cory Michael Smith — each of whom are capable of making any material watchable. If we’re talking about a “piece of content” online, as opposed to a Movie movie, you could definitely do much worse than this.
Something Old
28 Days Later (2002, PlutoTV): One of the biggest releases of June is 28 Years Later, the third installment in an unlikely trilogy from two filmmakers, Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War), who had no idea 20+ years ago that they’d go on to celebrated careers. Until recently, the first two movies weren’t available to stream online, which gave them a kind of film bro cult status, the exact audience Sony is counting on to hype this new release into the mainstream.
Now I’m finally getting around to watching the movie I’d long heard about, starring Cillian Murphy as a guy who wakes up from a coma after a month to realize that he now lives in a post-apocalyptic London.
Part of me laughs when I see this movie’s $8 million budget called “shoestring,” but what is impressive is how Boyle and Garland used practical filmmaking techniques to make an epic adventure movie without lowering their ambition, despite the modest budget. Many of its tropes have been copied and pasted into every zombie story that’s come in the two decades since, which may have taken away from some of the wonder I would’ve felt had I seen it in 2002, but this movie did make me very excited to go watch 28 Weeks Later and continue the story before the new, big budget movie in a few weeks.
Something To Stream
Nickel Boys (Amazon Prime Video): Awards movies like this can slip through the cracks at the end of the year, especially when they don’t come with a lot of obvious box office appeal. But Nickel Boys was one of the best movies of last year, full stop, and the kind of movie I’d recommend to everyone for two reasons — 1) its powerful social message and 2) some extremely creative filmmaking.
Shot from the first person perspective and shifting between different POVs, the characters weave a cross-decades story of a group of boys who lived at a reform camp in the 1960s that was, for all intents and purposes, slavery. Read my full write-up from last fall and then check out the movie on Prime.
Trailer Watch: Wicked: For Good
Catering to the Broadway superfans helped turn Wicked part one into a phenomenon last year, and by Hollywood logic, that means part two should be even bigger. It’s clear I missed the wave in my review, and even after clarifying my thoughts, it’s clear I don’t have the best radar for just how far the fandom can push this BCE. To me, this second part looks to be touching on darker, harder material with the same bubblegum sensibility as the first part. But Wicked fans—theater kids everywhere—talk to me. Is this trailer doing it for you???