NEW YORK (OSV News) – One of the topics dealt with, more or less in passing, in writer-director Wes Anderson’s 2023 film “Asteroid City” was religion. It came in for something of a bruising, though the script didn’t linger on the subject.
Faith is put under the spotlight to a much greater degree in the auteur’s latest quirky work, “The Phoenician Scheme” (Focus), and the results are far more negative. Anderson’s script for this characteristically off-beat dark comedy begins by treating belief with slapdash levity. As his mannered movie progresses, however, a darker message emerges.
The centrality of religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, is tipped off from the beginning by the fact that one of the tale’s two protagonists is an aspiring young nun named Liesl Korda (Mia Threapleton). The other leading figure is Liesl’s neglectful, estranged father Anatole (Benicio del Toro), a shady global wheeler-dealer who goes by the moniker Zsa-Zsa.
Zsa-Zsa summons Liesl from the convent to become the heir to his vast but fragile business empire. Indifferent to wealth and fully aware of the corrupt means by which dad has acquired it, Liesl accepts the offer only because doing so might enable her to solve the long-ago murder of her mother.
On the way to a showdown with the principal suspect in that crime, Zsa-Zsa’s half-brother Nubar (an incandescently loony Benedict Cumberbatch), Liesl and Zsa-Zsa journey to the fictional third-world nation of Phoenicia, where Zsa-Zsa has undertaken a huge and complex construction project. They also meet with a succession of Zsa-Zsa’s business partners.
As they do, Anderson takes jabs at capitalists, crooked politicians and Marxist revolutionaries. Though some of the humor works, the movie eventually gets bogged down in its own eccentricities.
The screenplay’s treatment of faith, meanwhile, degenerates from a gently satiric approach to an implicit rejection of supernatural belief as pointless and redundant. Prayer, in particular, is depicted as futile and viewers are assured that they can know the right thing to do in any given situation without seeking divine guidance.
At one point, Zsa-Zsa undergoes an outward conversion to Catholicism that Liesl instantly recognizes to be entirely insincere. Pops, however, maintains that he can be both an atheist and a member of the church simultaneously.
Such a stance may be in keeping with the surrealist tone of Anderson’s production as a whole. But real-life believers will see through it as easily as Liesl does.
The film contains an implicit rejection of religious belief, some stylized violence with occasional gore, much irreverent humor, sexual references and a couple of instances each of profanity and milder swearing. The OSV News classification is O – morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
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