Has Jett finally become a Wes Anderson person? Civilization awaits the verdict. Jett and Gareth discuss why The Phoenician Scheme works for both of them and make room to remember Harris Yulin, one of those extraordinary actors capable of making a few minutes of screen time feel like an entire life.
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Gareth, who knew that one day we'd see Benedict Cumberbatch playing Orson Welles as King Kong in a movie? And for that reason alone, I love this film.
This film is called The Phoenician Scheme. My answer to your question, Jett, is I don't think anybody knew that, except Wes Anderson.
Yes.
But what surprised me even more, dear listener, not many people know this. Not many people know this. But the previous iteration of The Film Talk ended on a certain day, at a certain time, in my view, largely because of a certain film.
And it was a Wes Anderson film.
And so I blame Wes Anderson for the downfall of the first iteration of The Film Talk, because one of the other people in this conversation, I'm not saying who, one of the other people in this conversation was so incensed by a Wes Anderson film that I
And we did for about 10 years.
Folks, thanks for listening. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. This is The Film Talk. The conversation never ends.
We're going to talk about a Wes Anderson film, but it's not going to end our conversation.
Indeed, a film that I believe, Jett, you loved it so much that it made me go back to see it again, because The Phoenician Scheme was after 26 years, 27 years of watching Wes Anderson films.
It was the first Wes Anderson film that I saw that I did not want to see again, and also the first Wes Anderson film that I saw that I thought I needed to see again to make sense of it.
And then when you told me how much you adored it, well, far be it from me to dispute your adoration. So I did go to see it again, but I think you should be the person who leads off to tell us the premise of this film and discuss it first.
Well, the premise of this film is that clearly Young Wes Anderson saw either Confidential Report or Mr. Arkadon or Arkadon, depending on how the characters are pronouncing it, the great Orson Welles films.
This has got Benicio del Toro and his daughter Mia Threepelton, Michael Cera, cavorting around the world as Benicio del Toro tries to keep his empire together. Takes place kind of in the 50s in that stylized Wes Anderson world. We have a clip.
And in this clip, we've got Michael Cera, Benicio del Toro, Mia Threepelton. They're on a plane. Michael Cera comes out.
Looks like they've got a bomb. It might be in trouble. Let's listen in.
Did you just tell Marcey Bob, the Sacramento Consulting Magrid, to cover the gap? No. All of it, you said.
I speak French, of course.
You're fiddling with it again. Okay, yes, but I'm doing a strategy.
Listen carefully. Is this supposed to be here? It was under the lunch trolley.
Oh dear.
How much time does this have?
Eighteen minutes.
Perfectly fine. We land in ten.
Myself, I feel very safe.
And that is The Phoenician Scheme. And dear listener, there will be spoilers from here on out. And the first spoiler is that I was wrong the first time I saw this film.
You texted me and you said you like hated it.
Couldn't stand it.
I don't hate. I don't hate. Where do you put this word hate into my mouth?
Did I say hate?
I'll look up the text. Keep going.
I might have said that.
Yeah, keep talking.
I'm going to attribute 32% of the hate to where I was sitting in the theatre because I was in one of those shoebox multiplexes where in the third row, the screen might as well have landed on your head because the room has not been designed.
Hard to believe, dear listener, hard to believe, but there are some movie theatres, some movie theatres, not typically independently owned movie theatres. There are some multiplexes that are not designed with the viewing of films in mind.
And I was in one of them. And so I'm going to say at least 32% of my lack of enjoyment of this film was to do with having to crane my neck throughout because when I saw it again yesterday, I had a much better vantage point.
I'm looking at the text. Here's the exact quote. Quote, I hated it.
Unquote from Gareth Higgins.
I am withdrawing those remarks. The jury shall disregard because this is a wonderful film. It's a distillation.
It's interesting. It's a silly thing to say. It's a distillation of all of Wes Anderson's previous ideas because every one of his films is a distillation of his previous ideas.
And I would imagine that if you go back to the start, they are also a prefiguring of everything he would do later.
Watching a Wes Anderson film is like watching somebody use tweezers to build a tiny doll's house and add ever increasing layers of complexity to every room. And he has a wonderful ensemble in each of his films.
And then there's always one or two new people who show up. And in this film, the star making turn, absolute star. Wonderful.
Fantastic is Mia Threppleton.
Oh, I thought you were going to say Michael Cera.
Well, I mean, Michael Cera is great, but come on. Mia Threppleton is, she's not only the standout performance in the film, her character is the moral anchor of the film.
She plays a nun who is estranged from her father, who he takes on an adventure to get investor. After two viewings, it's still not clear to me why he needs the investors to invest their investments.
And it's also not 100 percent clear why the bureaucrats want to kill him. It doesn't matter. It actually makes as much sense as Mr.
Arkadin, which is famously a film that doesn't make any sense. You and I watched it late at night together here in Belfast, almost two decades ago.
But the pleasures of every piece of this film, it's like a jigsaw puzzle in which every single piece of the puzzle is worth looking at in its own right. And then there's this deeper thing. I just want to say one thing about this deeper thing.
This is a religious film. This is a film about the grace that becomes possible when we move beyond simple or even simplistic matters of belief.
There's an astonishing piece of dialogue where Mia Threepleton's character, Sister Liesel, talks about prayer. She says something along the lines of, I don't know if God's listening. I never get any answers.
But I just imagine to myself that I should do the kind of thing that I think God would suggest that I do. Beautiful, but that's also a lovely cinematic parallel with my favorite piece of dialogue in all of cinema.
David Mamet in Heist when Gene Hackman says, I'm not very smart. I just thought, what would somebody smarter than me do and do it? That actually is a crudely poetic outlining of apprenticeship to a spiritual tradition often is.
Mother Teresa, no less a person than Mother Teresa. Of course, Mother Teresa would say that she was one of the least of people.
But after Mother Teresa died, I believe journals or letters of hers were published in which she said that her experience of prayer was often one of emptiness and silence, that she felt like she was knocking on a brick wall and no answer coming back.
But that doesn't absolve us from responsibility to act with kindness and grace. And that's what this film is all about. Whether or not there is a person on the other side of these prayers, there's something inside us.
Many more things I could say. But I felt that strange sense to me, a little bit like what happened to you with Conclave of watching something ineffable. It's wonderful.
It's hilarious. It doesn't shy away from pain. Wes Anderson's films have never shied away from pain.
And what more could I want than a film that ends with Jesus' joy of man's desiring playing over the end credits, while great masterpiece paintings get their own credits?
And don't forget, what's the shot right before that, is water dripping into a bucket off to the side, like almost as someone is being baptized, because Benicio del Toro's character has gone through this transformation.
Well, and the piece of dialogue immediately before that, we're reviewing the film backwards. Do you remember what the last word of the movie is?
Remind me, you've seen it more than I have.
So they're playing cards, Benicio and Mia, and she's just been proposed to by another character. I mean, there are spoilers, but let's leave some things high in there. She's just been proposed to.
And Gia Giacorda, Benicio's character says, did you say yes? And she says, on a trial basis. And then they look at each other.
And then she says, hearts. And then we see the dripping water. It's a perfect little piece of beauty.
It really is.
And here's the thing, folks. I'll be as frank as I possibly can here. I've never been, it's always been, I'm not saying there's been discordance between Higgins and myself, but I've always had a problem with Wes Anderson movies.
I walked out of both Paris Dispatch and the Grand Budapest Hotel. But this one worked for me right from the start. And don't get me wrong, I've seen clips of Dispatch, like one with Jeffrey Wright, that is absolutely fantastic.
But the pacing was so statico, it felt to me like it should have been a coffee table book. And a lot of his films to me feel like this should be a coffee table book.
But this is a movie that I fell in love with right from the first frame because it's a movie that loves movies. There's two reasons. It's love of cinema and then it's narrative propulsion.
Right? It's a movie that loves movies. Right?
So right from the start, when I found out that Benicio del Toro's last name was Corda, he's a famous film producer, brothers, I thought, oh my God. And right away, so I realized this, is this a version of Mr. Archery and Confidential Report?
Those are two names for the same film, they're listeners. Orson Well's movie in which Orson Well plays a wealthy industrious, like Benicio del Toro in this movie. And he hires a private investigator and tells him that he's an amnesiac.
He can't remember what happened before he came to a certain city and began his fortune. So he hires a private investor to go and investigate this man's life that he can't remember.
So every scene to scene to scene to scene of crazy antics, this man is investigating something. It's kind of dark and eerie and scary and kind of wonderful.
And this film is so influenced by it and so in love with it that you literally have the big bad at the end. You have a series of characters, literally has the beard, the famous Orson Well's Mr. Arkadin beard.
So my point here is that it has this narrative structure which carries you along, which for me, something like The Paris Dispatch did not have. And then as Gareth brings out, it's a very religious film, so we have this transformation.
It's not a shallow, flimsy, frivolous film. It's not frilly. It's a film of, to the last word, great heart.
And that's why I can't recommend enough that for me, he's really married a strong narrative structure that propels you along, and that allows him to hang his wonderful conceits from his other films onto this. It works brilliantly.
And so why, why, genuine question, why don't you feel that way about his previous films? Because as you're talking about narrative propulsion, and you call them conceits, but you don't mean that in a pejorative sense.
That's what I see in all of his movies. So what is it about the previous films that you don't like, and what is it that's so different about this one? And I'm not trying to test you, I'm genuinely interested.
The stakes are very high in this one.
And so this is, I'm not trying to be a proponent for violence in cinema, because we know there's such a difference between real life violence, violence that destroys whole communities, and then the violence in movies, right?
But because we have a character die graphically, horrifically, like in a horror film, right at the start kind of reminds me of the Four Bloods Spike Lee film, which we have to see a character blown up. That right away gives us real stakes.
So the film works so strongly in a narrative level that things that would have irked me in other Wes Anderson films work completely because I am taken in because the narrative is working for me, if that makes sense.
Like that was my feeling right from the start, as soon as it started and that happened, I was like, oh, I see what you're doing, and it really, really works.
Whereas I didn't care as much about some, you know, who are these eccentric, wealthy people out there doing their business, and that's very dismissive.
Going to their magic mountain hotel. So here's the question.
That's dismissive.
You said you walked out of it early. Did you ever finish Grand Budapest Hotel?
No, I haven't finished it. Maybe if I had, I know, I'd be transformed. I will be completely changed.
No, no, no, because the very point that you're making about the narrative stakes being high, I won't say anything.
Okay, I will.
I would encourage you to watch it, and let's, you know, please report back to the listener.
I will.
So, all right, if you're not a Wes Anderson fan, if you felt like Rushmore was too disjointed for you, Rushmore is, along with Royal Tenements, are probably his most, I don't know, narratively flowing films, you're probably not gonna like The
Phoenician Scheme. What do you think you need to know going into this film if you sense that Wes is on to something, but you need an on-ramp, you need an on-ramp?
I would, and it sounds obvious based on our conversation so far, but I would say watch Confidential Report or Mr. Arkin, and there's two versions, and each one of them has their own pluses and minuses.
And maybe Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, because there's these black and white sequences in this film. I'm like, wow, this has a vibe of Tarkovsky. So I go Ivan's Childhood by Tarkovsky, great master, and then the Phoenician Scheme.
Beautiful.
I look to your thoughts on Grand Poodle Best Hotel. I have, because we're all about transparency here in The Film Talk, I've seen Ivan's Childhood. I think I've seen all but one of the other Tarkovsky films.
I think it's time for me to watch Ivan's Childhood.
Yeah, there's a great shot where the camera goes over a trench and it's just transformative. And that's one last thing I want to say about Wes Anderson in this movie.
Another thing that really stands out to me, and again, maybe he did the same thing in the ones that I've walked out of, is that when you think of his stuff, a lot of reviewers have talked about his films are like little tableaux, right?
Little picture books were, like I said earlier, a coffee table book. But in this one, it seems to me his style evolved. So at a dramatic moment at the end, one of the characters almost bursts out of the screen.
It's like breaking the fourth wall, and it's a camera movement I've never seen from Wes Anderson. And it's explosive and makes a huge impact. So it seems to me like his style is evolving.
Again, I haven't seen these other films, so I could be totally wrong. I feel like he's really doing something here. And talking about people doing something, what a segue.
There was a gentleman.
With high narrative stakes.
Yeah, there was a gentleman that has just passed away. Great American character actor. A lot of people don't know him.
They probably look at him and go, he's a that guy. He's a that guy.
You've definitely seen him. You've seen him many a time.
Yes, he's got over 100 credits on IMDB. Harris Yulin. Do you know anything about Harris Yulin?
What I know about Harris Yulin is Ghostbusters 2.
Oh yeah.
We played The Judge.
Sure. What I know about Harris Yulin is Night Moves. Oh yes.
We played Marty Heller. One of the great less seen, bleak films of the 70s. What I know about Harris Yulin is Scarface.
Woody Allen's Another Woman. Game Six. Think about these directors.
These are serious directors and they all pick this guy.
They all pick the Yulin.
A wonderful actor. Why, Jett, why did they pick the Yulin? After time, after time.
Because I don't know, was he in Time After Time?
I don't think he's not in.
No, he stands out.
Here's the thing, we'll play a little clip from Night Moves. This is the great mid-70s detective thriller. I've got a poster of it on my wall.
The only film poster I've got on my wall other than the one right above me, which I don't know if we've revealed on the show. We'll do that another time.
But so in Night Moves, Gene Hackman is a private detective and he finds out that his wife is having an affair with a Harris Yulin character. Now, Harris Yulin is only in the film for a few minutes. Gene Hackman is a huge star at this time.
Yet when you watch this scene, sure you're interested in Hackman, but you also really want to know who is this character that Harris Yulin is playing? Is he slim? He's got a cane.
Did he have an accident? Is he, why isn't he scared of Gene Hackman? It's a fascinating performance.
I don't know if we can get, if we'll come across too much in the audio, but let's listen to a little bit of his confrontation at, is it Marty Heller, is that his character's name, that Harris Yulin's Beach House? I think so. Let's listen in.
I'm not surprised.
I thought Elwin would tell you sooner or later.
Why? That's the way she is. She didn't tell me.
I saw you coming out of a movie.
How'd she take it? I haven't spoken to her. You haven't spoken to her?
What's this about? I want to know what I walked into. Ask your wife.
Hey!
Let's pretend I'm asking you.
How serious is it? For me, it's not too serious. For Ellen, ask her, I'd be guessing.
It seems to me, you're the one it's serious for.
He holds his own there with Gene Ackman. I hope that came out in the audio, because he has such an interesting look. And you mentioned Scarface.
He plays a corrupt cop in Scarface, and he just stands out, like you can't take your eyes off of him. And these are in scenes with Al Pacino. And yet you are drawn to Harris Yulin.
It doesn't matter how many lines he has in a film. You believe that this is a three-dimensional character. When he plays the character, when he's in movies like Ghostbusters 2, it's just called The Judge.
Well, he makes the film, yeah.
You believe he's real.
Totally, totally.
You believe he had a day before the day of the scene that he's in, and he had a day afterwards. I don't know, Jett, if you saw, did you see the HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True with Mark Ruffalo?
I did not, sir.
It was the last Harris Yulin performance that I saw. I think he only made a couple of things after that. I encourage you to watch I Know This Much Is True.
We miss him. It comes to everybody, but we're grateful for the life and work of Mr. Harris Yulin, who left us last week.
I'm going to go ahead and watch Night Moves tonight, just to think about it.
Just to cheer yourself up.
Well, in today's environment, Night Moves is a rom-com.
Speaking of rom-coms and speaking of Night Moves, I don't know when you're going to get to listen to this, dear listener, but if it's in June of 2025, when we're recording it, go see Materialists at a theater.
I don't know if it's going to last very long, but I'm sure we will record an episode about it soon. There's something very rare about that film that makes it absolutely worth your time to go and see in a theater rather than waiting to see it at home.
And there is a Night Moves connection.
So what we call a teaser, folks, that's a teaser. Can't wait to see it and talk about it with Gareth. I will say, folks, I feel like you just spoiled Materialists for me.
I don't know what it is, but there's a Night Moves connection.
It is not related to the plot of the film.
Okay, thank you for that. That would have been a huge spoiler. Folks, thank you so much for listening.
You can visit us at patreon.com/thefilmtalk or go to Facebook The Film Talk or at info at thefilmtalk.org if you want to help support this journey episode 301.
That's amazing.
It's definitely something.
I don't know that I mean, it is absolutely true. You're the person I've collaborated with over the longest period in my life on anything.
Well, there's still time. You know, get older, something could happen to me. I hope not though.
I do want to record that episode of The Materialist. Folks, thanks so much for listening to The Film Talk. I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins.
We'll keep talking next time.