Lost Worlds

“The Phoenician Scheme” is another triumph for Wes Anderson, while Alex Ross Perry mines Gen X longing in “Pavements.”

There’s a sense of de-cluttering in “The Phoenician Scheme,” on the part of writer-director Wes Anderson and his hero, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a European tycoon on the run from various countries, assassins and terrorist groups. It’s 1950, and Korda is famous for destabilizing global relationships with ruthless business deals that steal from Peter to pay Paul. He’s “Mr. 5 percent,” and he’s due for a new order.

The number of times that Korda is nearly murdered is a very funny running joke. He’s too entitled to feel endangered. In the droll and breathless opening scene, a panel of Korda’s plane is blown apart, splattering his administrative person against a wall, while he tumbles into a cornfield battered but ready to march another day. He tried to push a dangling vestigial organ back into place, but “it’s not as easy as it looks.”

The way that Anderson stages the explosion and crash of that plane should serve as a refutation to those who insist that all his movies are the same and that his highly individual and divisive aesthetic has no more tricks left in its bedazzling arsenal. The plane is one of Anderson’s symmetrical sets, and Korda and his assistant are facing the camera head on when the explosion occurs with a sudden casualness that speaks to Anderson’s absurdist yet visceral way of handling violence.

We do not see the crash, but rather the rubble among the cornfield as a battered Korda regroups while the media proclaims his demise, with his debris scattered about along the land. Most notably there are books on insects, which come to speak throughout the film of a sensitivity and curiosity in Korda that is never directly mentioned.

The crash is surreal, funny, expertly timed, rich in decisive choices in terms of what to show and not show the audience, and so it is special. Your senses are stimulated because no one else in cinema would ever show you a plane crash in this way. So many movies look and sound the same, especially the action blockbuster editions, and that seems to be what we want. Deaden those senses to make us forget about our troubles. How about enlivening our senses to make said troubles seem worth braving?

By the time the title appears, there’s been more breathtaking imagery in “The Phoenician Scheme” than many directors will summon throughout their careers. After the crash, Korda is seen soaking in a tub, and Anderson shoots it from overhead so that the title of the bathroom floor suggests wallpaper. Korda is flush against the left of the image, while signifiers of his power dot the frame, including a bottle of champagne icing in the bathroom sink. It’s a stunning image and it hits you in multiple fashions, tickling the eyes while alluding to Korda’s loneliness.

But you have to see that loneliness for yourself. Anderson’s deadpan writing expects you to. There won’t be any spoon-feeding along the lines of “Mr. Korda you haven’t been yourself since exposition and more exposition.” I suspect that this is the reason that certain people resent Anderson’s movies. You have to come to them.

Korda summons his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who is soon to be sworn in as a nun. He wants her as his heir even though they are estranged in the tradition of many fathers and children in the Anderson canon. Anderson sometimes overdoes the daddy stuff: “The Royal Tenenbaums,” of course one of the few Anderson movies that most people claim to enjoy, has too much therapeutic talk.

Korda and Liesl’s relationship is more subliminal. They shield themselves from one another with that vintage Anderson deadpan behavior, occasionally saying something devastatingly offhand that cuts to the root of the matter.

One line especially hit me in the breadbasket: When it is suggested that Liesl may not be Korda’s child, he asks if he can adopt her if she isn’t his. Scenes like this are why I’m not sympathetic to the idea that Anderson is a repetitive peddler of pointless art-house whimsy. But again: You have to come to him. Del Toro nearly throws that line away, and that’s why it’s moving.

The plot finds Korda and Liesl scurrying across an imaginary global landscape, trying to save his plan to fold an undeveloped country into the capitalist world order. As Korda hemorrhages money — de-cluttering — he becomes more human. A lovely subtle trick of the movie is how Korda starts talking more reasonably to the featured guest players as he’s humbled. The third major player is Bjorn (Michael Cera), who is supposed to teach Korda’s many sons about bugs, but who has other motives.

Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and Mia Threapleton in Wes Anderson’s latest screwball farce, “The Phoenician Scheme.”

Anderson de-clutters as well. “The Phoenician Scheme” is narratively quite direct, without the filmmaker’s elaborate framing devices. The imagery is streamlined as well: extravagant, but, by the standards of this unique stylist, comparatively pared down. Alexandre Desplat’s score is unexpectedly menacing, complementing Anderson’s evocative use of Del Toro’s battered visage. Speaking of which, there’s an increased emphasis on physical harm here. There’s fury in Anderson’s direction, a sense of his wanting to tear everything down and claw at the emotional manna that’s just under the jokes and art direction. Such fury was present in “Asteroid City” too.

Del Toro is in every scene and he’s wonderful: Anderson’s films always have an extra pop when their leads don’t quite seem to fit in with the decor. Think Gene Hackman in “Tenenbaums” or Ralph Fiennes in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Del Toro is in that tradition of the suave movie bastard with just the right element of destabilizing grit.

This is a bouncier entertainment than “Asteroid City” or Anderson’s recent adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, as “The Phoenician Scheme” is essentially a screwball farce crossed with a global adventure. You don’t necessarily have to be an Anderson head to get on this movie’s wavelength. But there’s an air of despair about it nonetheless.

Korda’s wealth comes to suggest our obsession with money and our hopelessness with the sociopolitical project. Korda faces a cabal of global interests, including the church, and the solution is to strip down and savor, purging the spiritual rot that so easily spreads. The final line, a reprise of a running joke, is among the most moving moments in Anderson’s cinema. The final images are of true community, bound against the cold.

 

In “Pavements,” producer-director Alex Ross Perry vividly captures the spirit of a very specific strain of 1990s-era pop culture: alt-rock and grunge and its representation on MTV, and the attending mixture of sarcasm and despair and haughty superiority that tended to go with such endeavors. That’s right Gens Z and Alpha: being the teacher’s pet, constantly bragging to the public about your health and empowerment and sense of social responsibility, wasn’t always cool.

Perry’s subject is Pavement, which released five albums across the ‘90s before breaking up in ’99 and leaving a passionate cult in their wake. Their songs sound confrontationally unpolished, with lyrics that do a loop-de-loop from irony to earnestness and back again. That sort of music, back when rock still existed, was fashionable at the time.

Is the music authentic, a hipster joke, or all of the above? Perry follows suit by fashioning a docu-fictional slipstream that affirms mythology under the guise of deconstructing it, or perhaps vice versa and all of the above. “Pavements” is less interested in offering the info nuggets of a conventional documentary than in erecting an inhabitable and ambiguous world of media and nostalgia. Yet, as in Perry’s fictional narrative films, there’s acidity too—a distrust of sentimentality.

“Pavements” opens in 2022 with several events underway: Perry is mounting both a theater musical structured around Pavement’s albums and a lame-looking Hollywood biopic, while the band readies for a reunion tour and the opening of a museum exhibit. Some of those things actually happened, though I doubt Perry or Pavement’s audience will need any help discerning the parody of the highly expendable biopic strand.

Narratively speaking, these strands all feel kinda the same, and so a peculiar form of stagnancy settles into many of the film’s 127 minutes. Namely, there’s a constant sense of activity that doesn’t seem to amount to much. There are bits about Pavement’s formation, which aren’t detailed enough to distinguish themselves, and there are many, many, many scenes of Pavement noodling around on instruments. The production of the theatrical show, which Perry actually mounted, suggests a compelling bridge between Gen X and Gens Z and Alpha, but Perry doesn’t devote much time to it.

Texturally and tonally, though, “Pavements” is impressive, especially in terms of how Pavement songs resurface in differing contexts, uniting and dividing evolving scenes, in essence speaking to how we digest music and use artifacts of the past to access prior parts of our lives. You don’t have to be fan of Pavement to find Perry’s reverence of their music moving, and he utilizes Stephen Malkmus the way that he used Ad-Rock in “Golden Exits:” as a commanding and aloof yet playful embodiment of a lost age.

The formal language and organization of “Pavements,” as overseen in part by the masterful editor-filmmaker Robert Greene, is more intriguing than the scenarios that Perry has dreamed up. The jagged cuts and fluid camerawork and expressionistic blending of images forge an analogue grunge immersion chamber that can speak not only to Pavement’s admirers but to people for whom the wooly American ‘90s have come to feel like a dream. In this context, it’s not so surprising to hear that Perry’s next film is a 3-hour documentary about video stores. He may be turning into the Gen X-Millennial cinephile’s answer to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is in theaters everywhere, while “Pavements” is playing at Movieland.

TRENDING

WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW — straight to your inbox

* indicates required
Our mailing lists: