Diary of a Theologian

Wes Anderson's Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson’s Phoenician Delight

I had seen the previews and did not think I would like it. But when The Living Church published its review, I knew I should see it. 

The film is The Phoenician Scheme. Mid-twentieth century, there is a powerful, rich man with a scheme to make a fortune (another fortune?) from a project that involves slave labor and engineered shortages. In addition, this man has survived many assassination attempts—and has had black-and-white visions of an afterlife. He has nine sons and one daughter. He has decided to make her his sole heir. She must help him with his scheme. She is a novice Catholic nun. The film’s set-up is over-the-top unrealistic yet contains stylized scenes and background classical music. It is, of course, a comedy, if a dark one. 

[There are spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.]

One might say it is a comedy in the classical sense. TLC says, with a nod to Thomas á Kempis, that it embodies the conflict in the human heart between the Way of Nature and the Way of Grace. The father embodies the Way of Nature, including being a “relentless destroyer of all that stands in [his] way.” The daughter, in white habit, embodies the Way of Grace. Her father had sent her away when she was 5. He has just summoned her to him for this scheme which he then unfolds before her. She is there—present—and yet surprising: she gets his sons to start saying prayers; she offers forgiveness, quickly, with a small sign of the cross, whenever he makes the slightest sign of regret.

It all comes to naught, his plan. He ends up underwriting the whole project—which (without slave labor etc.) does benefit the people of Phoenicia, but at the same time it bankrupts him. Why does he do that? At the end, he and his daughter are relaxing at cards following a day of cooking and serving food and washing dishes—they are doing small-scale good in life and they are enjoying simple pleasures. She is also now engaged. She admits to a certain agnosticism about prayer. Has he repented? Is this what reformation looks like? 

I am told that Wes Anderson is not known for taking religion seriously. But I was delighted to see this film, in which religion and power meet and, like a true comedy, the end is satisfying.

In this sense, as I’ve said before, the book of Job is also a comedy—though it gets to its simple, home-centered conclusion in a rather different way! 

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Out & About: The Good Books & Good Talk seminars resume in Dallas on Sun., Sept. 14, with Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. I highly recommend this book to everyone, and if you can join the conversation all the better—5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

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 On the Web. Christianity Today has also taken note of Wes Anderson’s current film. Their review is titled: “Wes Anderson Finds God, Played by Bill Murray.” Their summary line? “The Phoenician Scheme is absurd and imperfect. It also takes faith seriously.” https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/06/phoenician-scheme-wes-anderson-culture-movies-hollywood/

TLC’s final verdict is worth quoting as well: “In The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson makes a strong case that the Church is the only effective form of protest against sin, evil, and death that we have.” Its review is here: https://livingchurch.org/books-and-culture/film-reviews/the-dogmatic-theology-of-wes-anderson/

Water and Flood

While necessary for life, water is also a danger—a reality that the Bible recognizes from the beginning.

    Once God creates life, he turns to the problem of water. It, water, is just there. We first learn of it when God’s Spirit hovers over it. But then it seems to be everywhere—meaning, there’s no place for God to put created things. So he needs to open up a space in the midst of the water. He does this by making the “firmament”—an odd word; some modern translators prefer “sky” but the problem with “sky” is that you think you know what it is. Nobody knows what the firmament is! It is, just, something that is solid and stretched out, and because it is solid, it can hold water up. And that creates a space, with water above (on the other side of the sky, as it were) and water below.

    It is within this opened up space that God causes dry land to appear, and then makes various things to fill up the space: things on the land and things that move in the air. He also makes things that move in the water below, which constitute, of course, all the seas. 

    In Genesis chapter 2, the reason God makes Adam is to help things start growing. The earth in this chapter is dry—that’s one reason why nothing is growing. The other is that there is no man to till the ground. So Adam is made for the humble job of tilling the ground. But the reader, remembering the waters everywhere in the first chapter, might worry about how the water is going to come onto the ground. If it comes down from the sky—through some sort of opening in the firmament—what is to prevent flooding? It would seem that rain itself is a threat to reverse creation, to eliminate the “space” that is needed for creation to flourish. 

    God, in Genesis 2, gets around the problem by causing a mist to come up from the ground and the earth gets watered that way. Problem averted.

    But centuries pass and about a thousand years later, when Adam has (recently) died and lots of other people have started dying, the human race becomes corrupt, violent, wicked, and in general a horrible mess. And God decides to start over—except, he notices that Noah is righteous. So God provides a way for Noah to survive the destruction. But what was the destruction to be? It was, of course, to be the Flood. 

    The point of the Flood that covers the earth is that God is reversing the creation made possible when, with the firmament in place, he separated waters above from waters below.

    The Flood, however, proves unsatisfactory. As soon as Noah comes out from the ark, he sacrifices animals to God—sacrifices that God did not ask for. And while the smell is pleasing to God, God also sees that every human heart contains a mixture of good and evil. He decides never again to try to reverse and restart creation. Instead, he will try a new way that begins with Abraham and culminates in Jesus.

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    The terror of water remains, as we have seen with horrific floods this summer. They are the counterpart to drought, characteristic of other summers, other places. We need water to live, and yet water, in its essence, is terrifying.

    This is true, one realizes, with almost everything. We need it, but not too much. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen—we and our environment need them. Mother love—we need it. Shelter, exercise, prayer, conversation, day, night—all the things that come with being human, they are needed, but they can be too much. Human life is the life of physical beings who can think and love and make decisions and act. As thinking and praying animals, we need all those things, but any of them can harm us if it is too much. (Even good things, like prayer and conversation, cannot be the entirety of our focus, though of course prayer and conversation could be defined in a vague way so as to encompass everything else.)

    The covid period, like the flood season, reminded us of something we prefer to forget, something that Job in the end saw. The universe God has made is not safe for us, if only for the simple reason that to be a physical being just is to be vulnerable to harm. But what Job and his friends came to in the end is deeply true also, something we have also seen in the recent floods, the stories of heroism and, now, solidarity and generosity in facing the aftermath. The final scene in the book of Job is one of warm comfort when all his friends and neighbors come together. 

    There is nothing more precious than human beings in communion, enjoying friendship in the midst of this usually beautiful but sometimes quite ferocious world.

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    Out & About: This Sunday, July 20, I am to preach at the traditional services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas; the services are at 7:30, 9, and 11:15.