THE LOST TYCOON

“The Phoenician Scheme.”

- BY RICHARD BRODY

Wes Anderson's new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is a funny-ha-ha comedy, but there’s nothing funny about its story, which involves a wealthy industrialist's attempts to realize a grandiose infrastructure project. Anderson's signature is instantly recognizable in the movie's decorative production design, its frontal and symmetrical framings, and its antic, densely plotted story—and equally in the fact that it is a violent and death-haunted action film, filled with fights and chases. Yet, compared with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) and the work that has followed, the new film is relatively simple: rather than nesting stories within other stories, it follows its protagonist closely. The result is a heightened clarity—revealing the distinctive world view that Anderson’s methods embody—and an unusually direct emotionalism.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is the story of an amusingly bad man who becomes a little less amusing and a little less bad. Benicio del Toro, alternately glowering and glib, stars as Anatole (Zsa-zsa) Korda, an Onassis-like figure of uninhibited ruthlessness. The action, which runs from 1950 to late 1951, begins as Zsa-zsa, a proud citizen of no country, flits about in a private Air Korda plane that he knows to be a target of saboteurs. Sure enough, mid-flight, a hole is blown in the fuselage, and Zsa-zsa, taking the controls, crash-lands the plane. Unconscious, he has a near-death experience—filmed in black-and-white with a sense of both comedy and wonderment—in which he arrives in a cotton-puff Heaven under the severe scrutiny of a berobed gatekeeper (played by Willem Dafoe).