Writer of the Lost Oligarch 

• Focus Features
• Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton in The Phoenician Scheme

Anatole "Zsa-Zsa" Korda (Benicio Del Toro)—the main character of Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme—is not Elon Musk. Not specifically, anyway. It's certainly easy to note some points of similarity, given that Korda is a wealthy businessman with a number of children even he can't seem to keep track of, and whom he generally ignores. Yet while it would be fun to snicker at the idea of this somehow being a stealth roman á clef takedown of a hated figure, I don't think that would give Anderson enough credit for taking one of his meticulously-crafted comedies and once again finding a way to give it a surprising heart—even if it asks you to find some sympathy where it may otherwise be hard to find it.

Because let's face it: Korda is exactly the kind of master-of-the-universe dickhead we all now have to spend way too much of our lives thinking about. In a story set in 1950, Korda is trying to finalize his latest attempt at a mega-deal, one that will bring infrastructure to an undeveloped area provided he can complete it before one of his many enemies succeeds either in killing him or ruining him financially by colluding on raising the project's costs. Desperate to hold the deal together, Korda sets out to persuade his many co-financiers to fill in the shortfall, accompanied by the daughter—novitiate nun Liesl (Mia Threapleton)—that he hopes will become his heir.

Much of what follows is fairly episodic, as Korda and Liesl visit those co-financiers, most of them played by veterans of previous Anderson movies: Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as brothers; Scarlett Johansson as a distant cousin of Korda's; Mathieu Amalric as a French club owner; Benedict Cumberbatch (from Anderson's Oscar-winning Roald Dahl-adaptation short film) as Korda's estranged brother. There's a lot of wonderful silliness built into the film's first half, much of it involving time-honored devices like exaggerated accents (most notably Michael Cera's Swedish Chef-style Norwegian lilt as Korda's new personal secretary) or crazy facial hair, and it would certainly be easy enough to enjoy it simply on a level of surface pleasures—in other words, the level that Anderson's most fervent detractors say is his only level.

Yet The Phoenician Scheme also applies its sneaky humor to skewering the existence of the very rich, both in terms of the way they see the world and the capriciousness with which they carry out their affairs. We do get some pointed dialogue in which Korda tries to weasel his way into a justification of slave labor, but mostly things are a bit more subtle than that. When Korda and a Middle Eastern prince (Riz Ahmed) take on Hanks and Cranston's brothers in a game of H-O-R-S-E to determine whether or not the additional financing will come through—with a well-considered cutaway from the actual result—it feels like the bet between the Duke brothers in Trading Places in suggesting how blithely millionaires approach matters that will have life-changing impacts on others. There's a reference to family squabbles involving poison gas developed as part of war profiteering, and a running gag in which Korda casually offers each of the people he's soliciting a hand grenade as swag. As Brian Cox's patriarch from Succession might say of these economic titans, they are not serious people.

It's perhaps a bit surprising, then, that Anderson ultimately finds something resembling compassion for people who only seem to see the world as transactional. While Del Toro and Threapleton adopt much the same deadpan demeanor as the rest of the cast, they find interesting territory in approaching the relationship between father and daughter as a negotiation. Meanwhile, Anderson keeps dropping oblique references to Korda's own backstory, and the events that might have turned him into someone who doesn't understand how to have real familial relationships, leading up to a surprisingly affecting finale. While the period-piece setting offers a bit of distance, The Phoenician Scheme finds something pretty contemporary in the notion of people who focus on their big swings on big stages because it's the only way, in the absence of individual personal connection, they can see to find purpose. Not that we're naming any names.