I haven’t seen Laura Piani‘s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, but leaving aside this Sony Pictures Classics release, we’re obviously looking at a dreary weekend.
The only respectable diversion, for some, is Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme, which I saw a couple of weekends ago in Cannes. And yet it only has a 77% RT rating, which by high-school grading standards is equivalent to a C-minus. Has anyone seen it?
I felt immediately mystified hy the casting of Mia Threapleton, the 25 year-old daughter of the once-married Kate Winslet and painter-filmmaker Jim Threapleton, in the lead female role. She delivers the same kind of standard deadpan performance that Wes always gets from his actors. The odd thing is Threapleton’s appearance. She’s not only short and chubbyish, but her face is wider than it is tall, and I’m sorry but she simply doesn’t stir the pot. I just couldn’t understand why she was cast.
Otherwise The Phoenician Scheme is another Wes comfort zone movie. Too much so.
Posted on 5.19.25: It’s not important or even noteworthy, trust me, to explain the plotline of Wes Anderson‘s exactingly composed The Pheonician Scheme. Because it’s just (stop me if you’ve heard this before) another serving of immaculate style mixed with ironic, bone-dry humor — another signature tableau exercise in WesWorld stuff — wit, whimsy, staccato dialogue, a darkly humorous attitude, faintly detectable emotional peek-outs. Plus the usual symmetrical framings, immaculate and super-specific production design and the Anderson troupe reciting their lines just so.
I’ve written repeatedly over the last couple of decades that Wes needs to recover or re-charge that old Bottle Rocket / Rushmore spirit and somehow climb out of that fastidiously maintained Andersonville aesthetic and, you know, open himself up to more of the good old rough and tumble. Maybe there’s no remedy. Maybe we’re all just stuck in our grooves and that’s that. What’s that Jean Anouilh line from Becket? “I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what it has been given to us to do. Right to the end.”