The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson has lost the plot. And so did his latest film. I recently saw The Phoenician Scheme. It was unmistakably an Anderson film, he has a style like no one else. But as his been the trend with him, that style got in the way of telling a story. Enough already with the quirky characters and the deadpan expressions and the lovely colors, the famous actors popping up in minuscule roles and the silliness. It’s gone from refreshing and exciting to…this again? Anderson is a director getting in his own way.
It was hard to tell what the Phoenician Scheme was supposed to be about. In terms of a storyline it resembled something a couple of stoned fifteen-year-old boys would concoct. It was all over the place with a lot of characters introduced seemingly for the sake of it. A great artist would either try to do something different from time to time or hit it out of the ball park every time. This was the same old schtick and it was a weak grounder to third.
My three favorite of Anderson’s films are Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom. They had beginnings, ends and middles. They were told with style and verve and a uniqueness that was extraordinary. But I don’t know what the hell he’s on about with his latest. I liked his previous picture, Asteroid City. That’s liked not loved. The French Dispatch and the Grand Budapest Hotel were also nice. But the downward trend had by then begun that for me culminated with hot mess that is the Phoenician Scheme.
It got me thinking about a somewhat related topic: do directors do their best work early and in the middle of their career and fade at the end? The simple way to answer that is to look at the last three films by great directors and see how they measure up to his/her earlier work.
Martin Scorsese’s last three feature films are Silence, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. All decent films but bloated and excessive and not at all comparable to the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas which are all masterpieces of modern cinema.
Francis Ford Coppola made the Godfather The Godfather Part 2, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now in the Seventies. Since then nothing to write home about.
John Ford ended his career with Cheyenne Autumn, Young Cassidy and Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend. Not exactly Stagecoach, Grapes of Wrath or The Searchers.
Howard Hawks, he of His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep and Red River, brought his career to a close with pictures called Red Line 7000, Rio Lobo and El Dorado.
Ingmar Bergman, my favorite director of all time, finished his oeuvre off with Saraband and a slew of TV movies that were little seen or heard of.
Federico Fellini, who like Bergman made a string of classics in the fifties and sixties, closed out his career with Ginger and Fred, Intervista and The Voice of the Moon.
Alfred Hitchcock’s long brilliant career petered out with Topaz, Frenzy and Family Plot. The latter of those three was a nice movie but nothing that one would compare with Psycho, Notorious, The Lodger or any of a dozen other classics he directed.
I checked out other directors -- Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Luc Goddard, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Billy Wilder, Vittorio De Sica -- and it was the same story.
The only exceptions I came across were Luis Buñuel — his last three were the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, That Obscure Object of Desire and Phantom of Liberty, all among his best — and Aki Kaurismäki who’s latest film, Fallen Leaves, is my favorite of his. It was preceded by two other excellent films, Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope. Of course Kaurismäki could conceivably come out of retirement and muck it all up. Hope not and doubt it.
It is rare indeed for a director’s best work to be at the end of his career. The creative flame must simply burn out. I suppose it can be likened to athletes who, absent an early retirement, are often shadows of their former selves as their careers wind down.
Based on his latest work, this already seems to be the case with Wes Anderson.
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