The Phoenician Scheme
Directed by Wes Anderson
Focus Pictures
Thomas Á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ may not be the hottest reference in contemporary cinema, but its central thesis drives the narrative of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. The Imitation speaks of two drives within the human heart: the Way of Nature and the Way of Grace. Nature is consumed by greed for wealth and power, for status and opulence. Nature is violent, a collector of the rare and beautiful, but a relentless destroyer of all that stands in its way.
In the history of cinema, the Way of Nature has had few better advocates then Zsa-Zsa Korda, a ruthless industrialist played by the leonine Benicio del Toro. His mottos are “Break but don’t bend,” “Never buy good pictures, only masterpieces,” and “If anything gets in your way, flatten it.” Korda is a force of nature: unkillable, indefatigable, an immense man of limitless physical courage who expects the world to cower before him. Humans are nothing but objects to be manipulated or killed.
Korda has a grand plan, the film’s eponymous Phoenician Scheme, in which he wants to remake a barren land of Canaan into a promised land in his own image. He is building a locomotive tunnel (through the region of Melchizedek), a hydroelectric dam (in the Valley of Nebuchadnezzar) and a waterway opening the country to commerce, each labeled boldly with the name of Korda.
He proposes to benefit the people of Upper Independent Phoenicia, by crushing them through a famine of his own making and, like the Pharaoh of Exodus, enslaving them to build his magnificent works. Everywhere Zsa-Zsa goes, he brings a box labeled Fresh Fruit containing vibrantly colored hand grenades. These he offers to acquaintances as another might offer cigars, and each accepts with a graceful, “You are too kind.”
These destructive bon-bons echo another figure who ushers death into the world by offering fruit to our first parents. Zsa-Zsa has only two real problems: one is an astronomical funding gap in his project, and the other a series of near-death experiences brought on by a variety of assassins. After each attempted murder, the movie shifts into a black and white dream set in a Heaven (strongly resembling Orson Well’s Othello) in which Zsa-Zsa faces his final judgment.
Fortunately for the non-nihilist movie goer, we also hear a healthy dose of the Way of Grace: the goodness, peace, poverty, and love of God. Into the rich tones of Zsa-Zsa’s life, Grace appears with a flash in the person of Sister Liesl, a novice nun vested in brilliant white. Liesl is Zsa-Zsa’s estranged daughter. She sees Korda’s small children, sequestered away from their father and his cowering servants, and demands with angelic ferocity: “There is no love in this house. As far as I’ve observed, God is absent. Why?”
Liesl comforts the boys with sisterly affection, speaks of love for all living creatures, and boldly tells Zsa-Zsa that his plans for famine and slavery are “damnable … to hell!” Overnight the boys are saying grace at meals and praying for the sick and the poor, as Liesl catechizes and cajoles those around her to cast their gaze higher. Her charm is that she is a slightly self-conscious, very human young woman, who gives her blind and constant trust to the providence of God.
The film follows this duo of Nature and Grace through a picaresque adventure, and despite a flurry of characters and locations, holds a tight focus on the tension between the two. They encounter a Lamech-like arms dealer (“He’s not human, he’s biblical!”), several comically ruthless businessmen and a communist militia. A baptism flows into a martyrdom, which flows into a flood, and the biblical references don’t stop. In the end we find that even Nature incarnate cannot stand in the radiant face of Grace.
The film begins with a painterly overhead shot of Zsa-Zsa and his servants set to Stravinsky’s Apotheosis of Apollo Musagète—the hymn glorifying the god of manly strength and beauty—but ends with a long shot of loving communion, set to Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” As the leader of the communist militia declares to Sister Liesl, “Religion is a sigh of the oppressed creature, it is a protest against suffering.” In The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson makes a strong case that the Church is the only effective form of protest against sin, evil, and death that we have.
The Rev. Bertie Pearson is rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
