Filmmaker Wes Anderson is a man of idiosyncratic yet consistent tastes. Through films like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” we have seen he enjoys, among other things, symmetry, primary colors, hotel rooms, The Kinks, cigarettes, Bill Murray, postwar America as filtered through the prism of memory, and most of all, bad dads.
So it’s surprising that until recently, Anderson has shown little interest in that most distant of fathers, the one upstairs. He has treated religion respectfully in the past, though as little more than ornamentation to his wider aesthetical project. But in his most recent feature “The Phoenician Scheme,” God is finally brought to the forefront (although, because this is Anderson’s cosmos, God is played by Bill Murray).
This is the rare film that kills its protagonist in the first scene. But when industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) meets his earthly end, he finds himself in the one place he can’t buy or threaten his way through: the afterlife. Before he’s sent back, it’s made clear that on his current path he won’t be invited back.
Korda is a mogul of the old class, a throwback to when our robber barons at least had the decency to produce things. He’s half businessman and half pirate, that rare breed of man who chills a bottle of champagne in a bidet filled with ice. If you squint your imagination you can picture Jackie Onassis perched on his arm.
Known as “Mr. Five Percent,” Korda has his fingers in several pies, from arms dealing to shipping to the titular scheme, which plans to irrigate the (fictional) country of Phoenicia and Korda’s pockets for years to come.
Shaken by his latest brush of mortality, Korda decides he needs to secure his legacy, and perhaps his soul if time permits. He names his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), as heir, choosing her over nine other sons he keeps stashed in a dormitory near the mansion (you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a bad dad). The only complication is that Liesl is a novitiate nun with no intention of taking over her father’s empire. She agrees to a trial period, if only to steer him and his vast resources to good, and also find out just who killed her mother. Time permitting.
In real life, Threapleton is actress Kate Winslet’s daughter, but has so assured a debut here that you instantly forgive her for it. Her Liesl is flinty yet devout, a perpetual pipe in her mouth and a rosary she wields like she’s prepared to garotte fools. You never question her piety, but like all people so certain so young, you wonder if the lady doth protest slightly too much.
Liesl may be wise beyond her years but she’s still only 21. In her efforts to nudge her father back to the light, she is startled to find the world nudges back. Korda will tolerate her efforts but on his terms, replacing her simple rosary and pipe with far more bedazzled editions. To her irritation she loves both, still a rich girl in her genetics if not temperament.
There’s also the problem of Bjorn (Michael Cera), her father’s assistant. He keeps tempting her with the more harmless worldly pleasures, like a Jiminy Cricket with mission drift. He offers a drink and she accepts; he offers a compliment and she accepts again, albeit with far more bafflement. It seems so much outside the convent is more complicated than she anticipated and that reformation is a two-way street. Liesl teaches Korda that the truth is a lot simpler than he’d like it to be, but then his own efforts at reform demonstrate the opposite to her. Salvation is tug-of-war.
Liesl’s lessons prove to have business applications. Korda is a man who craves control above all else, but if he’s to see his Phoenican scheme through, he’ll have to rely on that last refuge of the helpless: faith. Facing a budget shortfall, he must return hat-in-hand to his investors, all of whom have legitimate grievances. It will take a miracle for them to trust him again, perhaps even a literal one.
Korda notices his daughter praying before one of these miraculous instances and inquires what magic words got the job done.
“The phrasing of it, which I don’t recall, doesn’t matter. What matters is the sincerity of your devotion.”
Anderson is less interested in theological minutiae than the radical act of faith itself, be it a deity, a principle, or simply another person. It is hopefully not too much of a spoiler to reveal Korda is won over to the Church by the end, though once again on his terms. Even Liesl recognizes that he’s converting more for her than for God, understanding she and God are a package deal. If this seems rather mercenary in nature, that’s because it is, though conversion has been that way since the beginning. How many Catholic conversions have come from marriage, love over principle? But then again, isn’t love a principle?
The most critically discussed line in the movie comes near the end. We are back in the afterlife, this time with Korda and Liesl, both of whom are decidedly alive and thus prompting the question if this is even happening. Here Liesl says she doesn’t hear God when she prays, she merely pretends to. She then considers what God would want, then just does that. “Usually it’s obvious,” she says with her trademark confidence.
Some critics have interpreted this cynically, Anderson’s secular ethics where the idea of God is more important than the reality of him. I see it a bit differently.
Catholics don’t believe God speaks in the dulcet tone of Charleton Heston, at least only to a select lucky few. Rather, true conscience is learning to trust what we already know, to resurrect those feelings and memories we’ve tried to kill six times before. Sometimes the best way back to God is following the fruits to the tree branch all the way to the trunk. Love to the source of love, common sense to the one who decided it was common. We pray without hearing, convert without believing, yet the destination remains the same. With or without Bill Murray.
