THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (C) - I don't know if Wes Anderson has lost it -- or if he has just lost me. When you break a habit as a consumer, it can be difficult to rekindle the previous ardor for that product. Anderson used to be one of our favorite directors. We walked out of his last film, and barely tolerated this latest fussy production.
Anderson twee aesthetic, combined with his granular storytelling, has grown exhausting. "The Phoenician Scheme" is fascinating to look at -- mesmerizing patterns of meticulous design throughout -- but confusing to follow. Benicio del Toro stars as old-timey industrialist and arms dealer Zsa-Zsa Korda, who has a Rasputin quality to him -- he has survived multiple plane crashes and other attempts on his life. The latest has him thinking of his life's work and his estranged daughter, Liesl (nepo baby Mia Threapleton), who is a novice nun, and whom he reconnects with in order to serve as his main heir. (In typical Andersonian fashion, Korda also has a boatload of sons that he mostly neglects.)
Thus is unleashed the most needlessly complicated plots, wherein Korda plots his most elaborate scheme, involving the rebuilding of the fictitious region of Phoenicia while rival governments pull a global industrial maneuver to bankrupt Korda, who must then engage, sequentially, with his oddball investors to trick them into overcoming the looming financial debacle.
In tow with Korda and Liesl is Bjorn (Michael Cera), who purports to be a tutor for the boys (his specialty is entomology) and also serves as Korda's right-hand man. Bjorn pines for Liesl, whose vows are perpetually being challenged. All the while, Korda also experiences near-death hallucinations, which involve black-and-white excursions to something resembling ancient Greece or Egypt, with Bill Murray playing God (and making zero impact here). This will eventually lead to a confrontation with Korda's half-brother Nubar, played with villainous glee by Benedict Cumberbatch. As you'd expect, the cast if stuffed with ringers -- Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Willem Dafoe all elbow each other for goofball bragging rights.
I broke this up into three half-hour screenings, and each one felt like a heavy lift. It is only mildly funny, especially compared with Anderson's films of 20-plus years ago, which also were full of much heart and character development. Here, Del Toro and others grind out machine-gun dialogue in that flat affect that afflicts most characters; it's a bit like how Woody Allen kept writing the same movie over and over and just had younger actors take on his cadences and phrasings, no matter how beaten into the ground the whole shtick was. A clever coda here teases the idea of a much more interesting father-daughter tale.
Anderson has always been one to create unique worlds, full of quirk and wonder. These days he spends years and millions of dollars wallowing in his punctilious world-building and overstuffing his scripts with minutiae that still amusing him but leaves many of us numb to this cartoon-like existence.
ROOFMAN (Incomplete) - We gave this shaggy dog story about a clever criminal close to an hour, and there still was more than an hour to go, so we bailed. It just can't sustain its run time, despite the presence of Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst and Peter Dinklage. It didn't help that the narrative -- based on a true story -- often did not make sense and seemed like typical Hollywood gilding of a true story.
Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, an Army veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division with practical MacGyver-like skills. To provide for his wife, daughter and son, he starts robbing McDonald's venues by entering through the roof, waiting for the crew to arrive in the morning, locking them in the cooler, and making off with the previous days' proceeds. He gets caught, goes to jail, breaks out, and takes up residence in a Toys R Us, eventually getting bold enough to venture outside, where he has a meet-cute with one of the Toys R Us employees, Leigh (Dunst), at her church's toy-drive event. (He has set up baby monitors in the store's office, so he overhears Dinklage's boss interacting with Leigh.)
That's as far as we get in the first hour. That's a lot of time for set-up. The McDonald's heist at the beginning is the funniest part of the film, and you can see that in the trailer, mostly. There simply is no reason why a movie like this needs to be two hours and six minutes long. There was little promise that Tatum and Dunst (pretty flat in the first half) were about to set the picture on fire.
In addition, the idiot plot (albeit based on real life), got harder and harder to bear. There is a stray distracting story about a former army comrade (Lakeith Stanfield) that was going nowhere, and the way Jeffrey is seen romping around the store every night making a mess, it's a wonder that he was able to cover his tracks for as long as he did, raising suspicions only by the amount of M&Ms he was consuming. And the real Manchester apparently duped the unwitting Leigh for quite a while, although the way he is presented here -- looking unemployed and homeless -- it seems incredulous that they would strike up a relationship (even if it happened, in some form, in real life).
Tatum is a fun actor, but he has little to play off here. This is a lethargic offering from Derek Cianfrance ("Blue Valentine," "The Place Beyond the Pines"), who now seems well past his prime. The production overall felt a bit cheap, and the performances are subdued. The whole crew needed to pep this up and bring it in under 100 minutes. That extra half hour is a killer.
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