Whether working with actors or animation, writer/director Wes Anderson is his own unique brand of crazy.
When everything clicks — as with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox— the results are imaginatively marvelous.
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| Yet another in-flight assassination attempt forces Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro, left) to take control of the plane, while Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and Bjorn (Michael Cera) watch with mounting horror. |
This one’s somewhere in between.
For starters, it’s refreshing to see that Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola have delivered an actual plot that drives the wacky action (something sorely missed in Asteroid City). Granted, it’s a dog-nuts plot, but it makes sense, and gives the primary characters genuine motivation.
Anderson also tackles some weighty concepts along the way: legacy, mortality and the final reckoning that results from one’s confrontation with God.
God, of course, is played by Bill Murray. Who else?
The art direction and production design — by Stephan O. Gessler and Adam Stockhausen, respectively — are spectacular. The latter has worked on every Anderson film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, and he won a well-deserved Academy Award for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The wildly distinctive look of an Anderson film has become legendary. His characters inhabit often static environments that sometimes feel like gigantic doll houses, with theatrical-style backdrops and finely tuned details that don’t quite exist in our workaday world: more like hyper-reality. Anderson favors color schemes in earth tones and soft pastels, which — in this case — occasionally are interrupted by Heaven’s blindingly white monochrome.
Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel constantly plays with cockeyed camera angles and forced perspective; one early sequence is entirely a ceiling’s-eye view.
All of this establishes another of Anderson’s highly mannered, theater-of-the-absurd narratives: a style you’ll either embrace as cheerfully silly ... or dismiss as ludicrous.
The time is the 1950s. Zsa-Zsa Korda (a hilariously deadpan Benicio del Toro), a notorious plutocrat industrialist loathed throughout the world, is introduced mid-flight, as a bomb explodes in the rear of his private plane. He survives the subsequent crash: the sixth recent attempt on his life by unknown parties.
His gargantuan business empire also is under threat via financial scrutiny and political pressure, most particularly — at the moment — his complex “Phoenician Scheme”: an interlocking series of railway, shipping, mining and agricultural ventures designed to dominate a (fictitious) Middle Eastern country. This venture has been jeopardized by the U.S. government’s market-manipulating act to exponentially increase the cost of the “bashable rivets” necessary for all elements of Korda’s complicated plan.
He therefore must persuade each of his investors to accept less profit than contractually promised; each meeting becomes its own distinctive chapter.
