Be Grateful to Your Betters
Mountainhead, The Phoenician Scheme
 

Miles David Moore

Two noted filmmakers, Jesse Armstrong and Wes Anderson, have made new movies about the delusions of the very rich.  It isn’t exactly reassuring, or surprising, that the more pleasing of the two films is also the less believable.

Mountainhead, Armstrong’s film on HBO Max, could reasonably be described as a Dr. Strangelove for our time, although it doesn’t reach the giddy satirical heights of Kubrick’s movie.  It begins with high-tech tycoons Venis “Ven” Parish (Cory Michael Smith), Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) and Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef) heading for the Utah mountaintop estate of Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) for a poker weekend.  Souper’s estate, called Mountainhead as a rhyming tribute to his favorite book, is luxurious and impersonal, with two-story picture windows overlooking a snowbound landscape.   (“Who was your designer?” Jeff asks. “Ayn Bland?”)

Souper’s nickname is short for “Soup Kitchen,” a mocking reference to his $500 million fortune when the other three are billionaires. He is desperate to have the others invest in his Slowzo lifestyle app.  The others, meanwhile, have troubles of their own.  Ven, the world’s richest person, rushed new features of his Traam IT operation to market without vetting them first; the result is disinformation spreading worldwide, causing riots, assassinations and mass murders.  He is concerned, not about the carnage, but about the negative effect on his business.  Randall has just been diagnosed with cancer and dismisses his doctors as oafs because they cannot guarantee his immortality.  Jeff is worried about the implosion of his marriage; while he’s in Utah, his wife plans to attend a “fuck party” in Mexico.

Spoiler alert: no one plays poker at Souper’s house. They’re all too busy with their iPhones watching financial systems collapsing and people burning each other alive. “Why would the ATMs go weak-titty in Ohio?” one asks.

The foursome goes on a snowmobile outing, during which Ven and Randall have the following conversation:

VEN: Do you believe in other people?

RANDALL: There are eight billion people, so you kind of have to.

VEN: Are they as real as us?

RANDALL: Obviously not.

Meanwhile, those unreal people clamor for real information. This causes Jeff’s net worth to skyrocket, thanks to Bilter, his AI fact -checking app. How the others react to this is the crux of Mountainhead and sets up the film’s final conflict.  Ven and Randall see opportunity where everyone else sees chaos and tragedy, and Souper just wants to run with the big dogs.  Jeff actually has some feelings for other people, as well as a disinclination to sell Bilter to the others.  This makes him inconvenient to the others, and eventually they talk themselves into believing he’s dangerous too.  “He wants to stop the new world from being born!” Randall declares.

At a time when the public’s noses are rubbed daily in the grandiosity and hothouse reasoning of billionaires, Mountainhead paints an all-too-persuasive portrait of those who would be our overlords.  This is the problem with Mountainhead: the dialogue has a witty edge, but the claustrophobia—unlike in Dr. Strangelove—becomes oppressive. Mountainheadis like a version of Dr. Strangelove in which all the characters are Buck
Turgidson. Or, more to the point, it’s like an episode of
Succession, Armstrong’s most famous creation, in which all the characters are Lukas Matsson, the predatory, deceitful IT tycoon who makes a bid for Waystar Royco.  (OK, Jeff is a Roy—Roman, perhaps?).  The actors are persuasive, especially Carell, who builds on the rabid-tycoon persona he created in Foxcatcher.  But you may not want to spend an hour and forty-five minutes of your life with these nabobs, especially since cable news forces you to spend 24/7 with their real-life counterparts.

The Phoenician Scheme, conversely, is mostly a pleasure.  Set in 1950, it harks back to a time when billionaires were few and they didn’t have nearly as many means to manipulate the wealth of nations.  For Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), protagonist-antihero of The Phoenician Scheme, that just meant he had to try harder.

The Phoenician Scheme begins with the latest of many attempts to assassinate Zsa Zsa by blowing his private plane out of the sky.  He survives this one too, but apparently this is the first time that he has an out-of-body experience, standing before a heavenly tribunal judging whether he is worthy of entering Heaven.  He will have several such experiences during the film.

Partly as atonement, partly because he knows he can’t live
forever, Zsa Zsa brings his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) into his business and makes her his heir.  Impassive Liesl is a novice nun, sent to a convent at age five after the mysterious death of her mother.  Liesl suspects Zsa Zsa of murdering her mother, as does almost everyone else. Still, Liesl moves into her father’s palazzo and is introduced to her nine stepbrothers, whom Zsa Zsa adopted in the hope that one will grow up to be an Einstein.

Known as “Mr. Five Percent” for always getting five percent of any deal he makes, Zsa Zsa goes into overdrive implementing his “Phoenician Scheme,” a takeover of the entire infrastructure of the nation of Phoenicia.  “It will require slave labor,” Zsa Zsa says, “but that is available to us.”  However, the financing for the scheme has become shaky, so Zsa Zsa fires up his new plane and flies to various destinations to persuade his investors to stick with the project.  These investors are a motley lot, including sour -tempered brothers Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston); Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) and Marty (Jeffrey Wright), two shady characters who profess great friendship for Zsa Zsa despite trying to get him killed, and vice versa; Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), Zsa Zsa’s second cousin and prospective fiancée; and finally the fearsome Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is more corrupt than Zsa Zsa and all the others put together.

Zsa Zsa takes Liesl with him, and also Bjorn (Michael Cera).  Bjorn is a Norwegian entomologist whom Zsa Zsa hires as a tutor to his sons but transitions to the job of administrative assistant.  (Being Zsa Zsa’s administrative assistant is a perilous endeavor, as demonstrated in the film’s first scene.)  Meanwhile, the U.S. government, through the activities of super-spy Excalibur (Rupert Friend), is trying to put a stop to Zsa Zsa’s nefarious project.

This doesn’t even describe a fraction of the convolutions in the plot of The Phoenician Scheme, which means it is a typical Wes Anderson production.  As most critics have pointed out, The Phoenician Scheme combines two of Anderson’s trademark themes: the misbehaviors of the rich and dysfunctional family relationships.  It isn’t giving away much to say that in the end Zsa Zsa reconciles with Liesl and becomes a better person.  It also isn’t giving away much to say that the film is as resplendent as Anderson’s films usually are.  Anderson’s usual crew deserves to take a bow, including cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, production designer Adam Stockhausen, and composer Alexandre Desplat, the last of whom receives a considerable boost from Stravinsky. Everyone in the cast is excellent, but Cera, as a sweetly goofy guy harboring a secret, steals every scene he’s in.

The Phoenician Scheme isn’t one of Anderson’s best films—Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugarare my nominations for that honor—but it is pleasantly loopy in its maker’s usual way.  I am guessing that Jesse Armstrong would not approve of Anderson’s ending, but Charles Dickens would.