The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his dark, melancholic best ...Middle East

“I myself feel very safe,” is one of the finely tuned running jokes Benicio del Toro utters repeatedly throughout the course of The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson’s latest film.

The year is 1950, and Del Toro is maverick, ruthless billionaire Zsa Zsa Korda, a schemer who engineers industrial wonders and manipulates international financial markets to his gain – and who has a habit of getting into plane crashes and surviving assassination attempts, even as others around him perish. Rumoured to have murdered all three of his wives, he is a little bit Charles Foster Kane and a little bit Howard Hughes.

The Phoenician Scheme, split into the precise, quirky novelistic structure that Anderson is known for, tells the story of Korda’s attempt to build his greatest project yet, a dam and water-processing facility in a politically contested location in the Middle East. It follows his efforts to talk each of his highly eccentric international funders to continue to put up the money despite huge financial risk. Meanwhile, the latest attempt to kill him has left him with some minor neurological problems, and so he pairs up with one of his many estranged, errant children – the only girl among them – to join him on his journey.

Enter Liesel (Mia Threapleton, AKA Kate Winslet’s daughter), a cigarette-smoking, red-nail-polished nun who is deeply unconvinced by her father’s attempts to befriend her and make her the sole heir to his fortune. Korda, always desperate to learn new things, surrounds himself with tutors, and so their team is completed by Bjorn, an oddball Scandinavian expert in insect biology played by Michael Cera, whose plot-twist tricks make him one of the funniest characters in the movie. He manages to switch between timid, tremulous professor and dashing hero with aplomb.

In their efforts to secure their dwindling funds and dodge government assassins, the unlikely trio meet all manner of investors: American scions with a penchant for basketball (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston in a very funny brotherly role), French crime bosses (Mathieu Almaric, known as Marseilles Bob), and utopian urban planners (a severe Scarlett Johansson) among them. Made with Anderson’s typically droll tone, it’s often very funny and continually surprising.

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Even for Anderson fans, The Phoenician Scheme may feel a little byzantine. It’s certainly laced with more overt darkness than some of his other projects; there’s real violence here, with talk of slave labour and the global threat of careless, rich “world-builders”.

But, for me, this darkness is what makes it sing. Anderson’s films often feel too blasé and cutesy, his beautiful stylistic flourishes and retro design too slick or airlessly deadpan to have any weight or meaning. But The Phoenician Scheme doesn’t fall into this trap – there is a seam of deep melancholy here, as there is in Anderson’s best work, with fractured family relationships and lost hopes at its core.

It’s the father-daughter relationship that takes precedence in The Phoenician Scheme, and Anderson gives us a rather beautiful conclusion of simplicity and acceptance. Del Toro’s performance as a blustery, fast-talking businessman is interrupted by the moral intrusion and straight-talking of his blunt daughter, who is able to cut through to his vulnerability. Ultimately, it’s their reconciliation that counts for the most. For all of Zsa Zsa Korda’s grand ambitions, it’s the relationship that remains, with the pair playing cards together in cramped impoverishment. World-shaking fortunes be damned.

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