In the 27 years since Wes Anderson made Rushmore, his movies have only become more deliriously decorative and ostentatiously ornamental. Among the things audiences will encounter in Anderson’s new movie, The Phoenician Scheme, are shoeboxes containing business plans, multiple rosaries, assorted assassins or would-be assassins, a diplomatic pouch holding handkerchiefs and other valuables, a fruit box repurposed as a crate of hand grenades, and the inscrutable, vaguely illegal scheme referenced in the title. This list is apt to come across as exhausting in the manner of the litany of clubs and societies run by Max Fischer in Rushmore, including the Calligraphy Club, the Bombardment Society, and, most memorably, the Rushmore Beekeepers. Yet the most rewarding way to view The Phoenician Scheme may be to look past its accumulation of filigreed bric-a-brac and focus on the unexpectedly touching, tender story at its center: the unlikely reunion of roguish magnate Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) and his piously inclined daughter, a prospective nun named Liesl (Mia Threapleton).

To be sure, Anderson remains as devoted as ever to building out the world that surrounds his leads. The film is replete with oddball cameos, distracting subplots, and tons and tons of props, all presumably realized to the auteur’s exacting specifications. But, to his credit, Anderson recognizes that few will care about his inexhaustible reserves of inventiveness if they do not first develop a rooting interest in Zsa-zsa and Liesl, whose names may be unbearably twee but whose inner lives, as brought to life by an impressively commanding Del Toro and an appealingly dry-witted Threapleton, are rendered rich and interesting. If, in recent films, Anderson has too frequently neglected to anchor his flights of fancy in strong characterizations, as was the case in his most extravagant but least compelling movie, 2021’s The French Dispatch, in The Phoenician Scheme, he has recovered a proper sense of proportion.