A delightful capitalist in this economy? Only in Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme’

Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” opens with a bang: a grisly explosion, a plane crash and a dramatic close-up of tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), his battered face so lumpen and purple it resembles eggplant Parmesan. Zsa-zsa is a survivor and a fighter and an indefatigable entrepreneur; his relentless energy is matched by nothing else other then Alexandre Desplat’s thrilling ticking time bomb of a score.

He’s also a one-man plague whose ruinations include famine, slavery and a string of mysteriously dead ex-wives. “I never personally murdered anybody,” Zsa-zsa insists with unconvincing conviction. And yet, Anderson sells us on rooting for this robber-baron. We are the film’s mark. It’s a pleasure to be so deftly swindled.

The scheme of the film’s title is Zsa-zsa’s grand plan to build a dam, tunnel and canal in coordinates that roughly correspond to Saudi Arabia, but are here known as Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, presumably in honor of the ancient empire who prioritized trade over warfare and religion. (In their philosophy, the Phoenicians were closer to Amazon.com than Rome.) Zsa-zsa has already convinced the necessary parties to agree: a prince (Riz Ahmed), two American industrialists (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a nightclub impresario (Mathieu Amalric), a sailor (Jeffrey Wright) and his cousin-slash-fiancée (Scarlett Johansson). Due to price-fixing sabotage by his enemies, though, Zsa-zsa must now convince everyone to earn a little less on the deal using every tactic from barked threats to sports bets to a gift basket of grenades.

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The other characters are impressed by his commitment but they’re rarely fazed. Wright’s Marty sums up Zsa-zsa’s appeal in a single line: “I supposed I’m moved by this absurd performance.” Which we are. Del Toro’s charisma fills this larger-than-life role all the way to the brim. He speaks in threats, bluffs and declarations, and when he gets hopped up, his hair stands on its end. The script is all momentum and moxie and every line out of Zsa-zsa’s mouth is a zinger, a koan of mischief in its hypocrisy (“I’m willing to believe in the opposite of my convictions”) or delusional self-sufficiency (“I’ll save myself myself,” he asserts, as quicksand rises over his hips).

These escapades are set in 1950 and have a handsome vintage color palette of white, gray, green, metal and wood. The style is fitting since the modern world doesn’t make many men like this anymore, only ones who posture like big shots. As Zsa-zsa, bloodied from his latest near-death escapade, lumbers toward a news camera clutching his innards (“a vestigial organ,” he says with a shrug), the only contemporary equivalent who measures up is the filmmaker Werner Herzog who, upon being shot in the gut mid-interview, dismissed it as “an insignificant bullet.”

What Zsa-zsa’s passion project will actually do is a bit vague, even after he unveils a spectacular working miniature with running water and toy trains that exists mostly for the delightful inevitability that someone is bound to stomp around on it like Godzilla. That’s not a weakness in the script. The idea seems to be that whatever it is, accomplishing it is the accomplishment — that the goal itself is the goal. There’s money involved, too, of course, and it sounds impressive: 5% of the profits for the next 150 years. But it’s not like Zsa-zsa will live long enough to reap the reward. Over the course of the movie, he’s nearly murdered a half-dozen times by bullets, bombs, poison gas and a good old-fashioned clobbering.

“If it works, it’s a miracle,” Zsa-zsa sighs. Luckily, he’s traveling with an aspiring nun, his estranged daughter, Liesl (a strong Mia Threapleton), who insists she wants nothing to do with him or his money, professing the same allegiance to piety as he does to racketeering. The soul of the movie is in watching these ramrod opposites bend and intertwine. They’re also joined by a tutor, Bjørn (Michael Cera), a self-described bohemian who speaks in a sing-songy Swedish accent that draws every bubbling syllable out of the sentence: “Beer is de-li-ci-ous.” With his owlish orange glasses and mincing theatrical manners, Cera seems custom-designed for Anderson’s style. He’s as spot-on as the production design’s gridded tile floors or a crisp camera move that pans precisely to a visual gag.

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Lately, Anderson has been on a tear of using his perfectionist aesthetic to defend the act of ambition itself — to honor artisans who create masterpieces in a world of philistines. The only thing he loves more than a carved credenza (and here, they’re decorated with hieroglyphics) is the craftsperson who made it and the aesthete who bought it, instead of settling for something disposable. I was never a fan of Anderson’s until “The Grand Budapest Hotel” clicked him into focus. It was hard to believe he knew what he was talking about when his earlier movies tried to sell us on love between human beings. But a hotelier’s love of his linens? That I’ll buy.

With “The Phoenician Scheme,” Anderson is celebrating the art of the spiel, the capitalism that artists are supposed to be against. Zsa-zsa is no vulgarian. He’s a voracious intellectual who understands the value of a masterpiece on a practical level, buying great works by the dozens. But he doesn’t bother to mount most of his oil paintings, leaving them stacked against the walls of his 16th century palazzo like dollar records at a flea market.

And yet, a financial contract itself can be a thing of beauty. Lord knows, in order to make a movie, you have to broker plenty of them. Watching Zsa-zsa do his verbal pirouettes, I thought fondly of a former boyfriend, an indie film producer, who helped me buy a new car and talked the price down $3,000. “A gentleman negotiator,” the salesman beamed. It was as though I’d introduced Ginger Rogers to Fred Astaire.

The film is dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, Fouad Malouf, a businessman and engineer who stashed his own plans in the very shoeboxes that now store Zsa-zsa’s blueprints. But the character is more of a riff on the real-life oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian, the world’s richest man at the time of his death in 1955 and a template for today’s globe-roaming magnates who pledge allegiance only to their own ambitions. Zsa-zsa shuns passports; Gulbenkian declined British knighthood. Zsa-zsa has also inherited Gulbenkian’s moniker, Mr. Five Per Cent, and nemesis: a half-brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has the same name, beard and horned eyebrows of Gulbenkian’s son, a playboy who was so incensed when his father refused to let him charge a $4.50 chicken lunch that he filed a $10-million lawsuit.

“There is no love in this house,” Liesl declares. “God is absent.” There’s a lot of religious cross-talk that doesn’t entirely stitch together. Zsa-zsa repeatedly exclaims that Nubar “isn’t human, he’s biblical.” It’s anybody’s guess what that means. Some sort of Old Testament vengeance? Meanwhile, the imagery encompasses everything from Anubis, the Egyptian deity of the dead, to Liesl’s blasphemously bejeweled rosary that comes to symbolize the temptation to turn into her dad. It’s worth noting that we’re more disappointed when her Mother Superior (Hope Davis) reveals herself to be greedy than by her father’s flagrant scamming. At least Zsa-zsa is proud of his sins.

Or is he? Every time he gets close to death, he’s forced to stare eternal judgment in the face via black-and-white fantasy sequences in which Bill Murray plays God, with Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham and Charlotte Gainsbourg as his heavenly troupe. These scenes are stunning, poetic and unabashedly Bergmaneqsue. Between them and our own awareness that ancient faiths have built pyramids and temples that will outlast anything our century’s billionaires will manage to construct, you do feel a sense of divine awe.

It’s not that you have to believe that there is a force out there more powerful than Zsa-zsa, or heck, even money itself. But if that doesn’t move you, at least Anderson deserves reverence for negotiating how to get all these A-list talents to act in his movie for peanuts. He’s managed to build yet another dazzler, a shrine to his own ambition and craft. And while it sometimes feels a bit drafty in the corners, the accomplishment itself is plenty.