As the celebrated director explores a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship in The Phoenician Scheme, Laura Venning considers Anderson’s fascination with absentee parents, warring siblings and emotionally repressed patriarchs.
As recognisable as his penchant for symmetrical framing, whip-pans and French pop songs from the 1960s are Wes Anderson’s deeply flawed fathers and the families that endure their bad behaviour. From Dignan (Owen Wilson) haplessly looking to career criminal Mr Henry (James Caan) for paternal approval in 1996’s Bottle Rocket, to the grief-fuelled hostility between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) in 2023’s Asteroid City, fathers and families, whether made up of blood relatives, colleagues or companions, are at the core of the director’s work.
In The Phoenician Scheme Anderson crafts another imperfect patriarch. Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is an eccentric business tycoon – and the father of 10 children – with a knack for surviving plane crashes. And yet in this latest entry in the Anderson oeuvre the director turns his gaze away from fathers, sons and brothers towards the relationship between a father and daughter. Anderson had previously only touched on this dynamic, and this shift of focus can probably be credited to him becoming the father to a daughter in 2016.
The film is at once a darkly comic espionage thriller and the story of Zsa-zsa reuniting with estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who has emotionally removed herself from her father by retreating to a convent. When Zsa-zsa names her his sole heir, the pair embark on a hare-brained adventure to secure Liesl’s future, the potential for reconciliation hanging in the air.
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
So what does a typical Wes Anderson family look like? There’s usually parental abandonment of some form, sometimes via bereavement but more frequently through emotional neglect, with selfish parents inflicting psychological damage on their offspring that keeps them in a state of arrested development, and siblings in conflict with each other.
We certainly see unconventional familial dynamics at play in Wes Anderson’s early work. In Bottle Rocket, Bob (Robert Musgrave) endures his brother’s relentless taunting, while in Rushmore (1998) Max (Schwartzman) lies about his father’s profession to soothe his own status anxiety. But Anderson’s first and still most definitive portrayal of a repentant patriarch and an entire family in crisis is, of course, 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums; no list of great films about families would be complete without it.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
The precocious, overly intellectualised children of Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline Tenenbaum (Anjelica Huston) grow into repressed, emotionally stunted adults Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), each abandoned by their estranged father and at war with themselves. A business magnate, playwright and tennis pro respectively, the three Tenenbaum siblings bear emotional scars and are uneasy with the weight of their own achievements.
Royal, faking a terminal-cancer diagnosis to worm his way back into their lives, eventually faces the hurt he’s caused and tries to make amends. One of the film’s most touching moments comes when childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) confesses that he always wanted to be a Tenenbaum, to which Royal sighs ‘Me too, me too’. The apparent head of the family understands that he never really had a place in it due to his own hubris.
Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
Anderson practically remade The Royal Tenenbaums for a literal family audience with Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), his stop-motion spectacular. Mr Fox (George Clooney) is another Royal Tenenbaum: scheming, charming and egocentric to the detriment of his family and community. Like Royal, he comes to see the errors of his ways, repairing his relationship with teenage outcast son Ash (Schwartzman), who struggles in the shadow of both his father and perfect cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson). All these bad dads (and occasional bad mums, see 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited and 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom) have difficulty articulating their feelings, but tend to overcome their existential malaise in the nick of time.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Then there are the Andersonian family units that aren’t blood relatives at all, and these often display an even closer bond. Adoption is a recurring theme and almost always depicted in a positive light. Moonrise Kingdom’s Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) finds a loving home with Bruce Willis’ Captain Sharp, another lost soul in need of connection and one of the few adults that offers him sympathy and understanding. Meanwhile, Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) might have a traditional family structure, but her unsympathetic parents resent each other and need a book called Coping with the Very Troubled Child to understand their daughter.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
Although The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) does feature a reconciliation between undersea explorer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his son Ned (Owen Wilson), the former’s bond with his crew almost eclipses it. Klaus (Willem Dafoe), his intensely loyal first mate, reveals that he always considered Steve a father, jealous of Ned as an interloper. Likewise, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) might outwardly tell the story of the staff of a glamorous Eastern European resort, but it’s really another family yarn with Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) as its ostensible father. Then, of course, the canine companions in Isle of Dogs (2018) essentially become a family while trying to reunite Atari (Koyu Rankin), another adoptee, with his beloved dog Spots (Liev Schreiber).
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
All this parental trauma leaves its mark. ‘I love you too, but I’m gonna mace you in the face!’ says Jack (Schwartzman again) as his brothers get into a scrap in The Darjeeling Limited, still processing their father’s death while pursuing their absent mother – love and conflict intertwined. Anderson’s parental characters may not be saintly, and yet he consistently lends them tenderness and forgiveness without diminishing the pain they’ve wrought.
In Moonrise Kingdom, parents Laura (Frances McDormand) and Walt Bishop (Murray), listless and unhappy, make their confessions in the dark. ‘We’re all they’ve got, Walt,’ says Laura, to which Walt replies, ‘That's not enough.’ It’s this compassion for these flawed parents, from Royal Tenenbaum to Zsa-zsa Korda, that make Anderson’s films so affecting and relatable, despite their surface-level artificiality. As honest as they are whimsical, they show us family dynamics in all their tangled, humane profundity.
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