The Phoenician Scheme and Bring Her Back are in cinemas and Mountainhead is streaming on Neon.
I once had a boss for whom no deal was ever, truly, final. I would hear him on the phone to suppliers a week after we had taken delivery1, saying “Yeah, that doesn’t really work for me now” and basically force a renegotiation of terms.
I was reminded of him a few times this weekend, while watching Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead. Both feature businessmen with confronting negotiating styles and both are about men for whom business is a substitute for something that’s kind of broken inside them.
The Phoenician Scheme is dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, the Lebanese construction entrepreneur Fouad Malouf, and its central character, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is a charismatic globetrotting deal-maker intent on putting together one final grand package. He’s survived several plane crashes and appears to be a permanent target for assassination and if his time is really going to be up, he wants to leave something truly important behind. The Phoenician Scheme itself is a quixotic combination of infrastructure projects that will breathe life, commerce and an economically vibrant future into an unlikely desert landscape.
In order to construct this transformational network of rail tunnels, ports, dams and hydro-electric power generation, Korda needs a consortium of investors but a powerful cabal of global business interests are sabotaging his deal. By artificially driving up the price of hammered rivets, the economics of the scheme no longer stack up leaving “the gap” – a chasm between what the project will cost and what has been committed. This necessitates a frantic trip around the world to renegotiate everyone’s investment, including a pickup basketball game with Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, taking a bullet for Mathieu Almaric and receiving a blood transfusion from Jeffrey Wright.
On the journey with him are his new science tutor slash administrative assistant (Michael Cera) and – most importantly – his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton). She is about to dedicate her life to God, a development that is more than pertinent because Korda himself is having visions of having to argue his way into heaven without much success.
This is entrepreneurship as immortality – building something that will outlast you and that will finally prove to the world that you are more successful than your psychopathic half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Achieving immortality through making things is, of course, what artists like Mr. Anderson do, but, as Korda slowly comes to realise, you can also do it through your children. Especially if you adopt enough of them that one or two might make something great themselves.
You’ll notice that I haven’t written too much here about Mr. Anderson’s signature filmmaking style. That’s because it is a far less interesting aspect of the picture than its content and, besides, I’m sure most of you already know whether that style appeals to you or not. Suffice to say that his senses of humour, timing, colour and composition are all happily intact.
At least one of the tech entrepreneurs in Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead also has immortality on his mind. On his way to a billionaire bro’s weekend in the Utah mountains, Steve Carell’s titan investor, Randall, tells the doctor with the cancer diagnosis that he’s “a simpleton” and starts making calls about how far off humanity is from being able to upload our consciousness to the cloud. Ten years, he’s told. Five if Jeff (Ramy Youssef) will license his AI algorithm to Venis’ (Cory Michael Smith) exploding social media platform.
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It’s literally exploding, in fact, because the latest version allows users to upload perfect deepfake videos that malicious forces are using to destabilise the global political and social fabric. In the course of a weekend with no assistants, no hangers on, no families (a rule that all will break at some point), this quartet will realise that they have the wealth and power to take advantage of all this uncertainty and take control of the world – or at least what’s left of it.
Armstrong created the brilliant HBO show Succession and it wouldn’t surprise me if this particular scenario was one that came up in the writers’ room for that show but was left on the cutting room floor. Either that or one of the location scouts found a $65 million luxury home near Park City and they couldn’t find a way to use it sooner. Either way, Armstrong makes his debut as a director with the full support of the experienced Succession whānau and a strong cast who all manage to inhabit both the ridiculous levels of self-confidence that billions of dollars of wealth gives you, but also the pathological lack of empathy that comes from being insulated from any real-world concerns.
The tech they talk about is alarmingly plausible – if not already old hat – and Armstrong’s ear for corporate jargon-infused dialogue is as attuned as ever, but it is the pathetic man-child behaviour that we are left with. The bullying, the game-playing, the self-aggrandising and the self-delusion – all it’s missing is the ketamine.
I spent almost an hour and a half with the Philippou brothers’ Bring Her Back thinking that I would respect all the craft on display and give it a “yes, but not for me” review, followed by some form of hypnotherapy that would permanently erase what I’d seen.
Then it did something with the ending that I found quite moving – something that helped me recalibrate what I’d seen before. This was a surprise because the actor concerned – Sally Hawkins – is not someone who has ever done that for me before.
Hawkins plays a classic horror trope, the bad stepmother – in this case a foster mother to two orphaned teenagers (Sora Wong and Billy Barratt). Wong plays Piper who has a sight disability which means that she doesn’t notice that there’s something very wrong in the remote 60s-modern house that they have been sent to. Barratt’s Andy is older – three months away from being able to take guardianship of Piper – and he can sense that something’s up. The mute, staring, ten-year-old Oli (Jonah Wren Phillips) is a start.
Despite their larrikin YouTube background, the Philippous have got some serious filmmaking chops, as they demonstrated in Talk to Me in 2023 and when I started thinking how good it would be if they turned their hand to making a proper film I realised what a snob I was being. Bring Her Back is a proper film but it’s also one that loves being a horror film with all that entails (and entrails).
Friend of F&S, Miranda Harcourt was an acting coach on Bring Her Back and talks about it in her latest newsletter:
I’m not going to tell you what the product was.
