I keep wondering what it’s like for those people who watch The Phoenician Scheme as their very first experience with a Wes Anderson film. What is the sensation of coming upon this as an initial encounter with the meticulous puzzle-box sets, the grab-by-the-lapels color schemes, the costumes that are retro but from another dimension, the antic comedy delivered with deadpan understatement. Is it dazzling or baffling? Energizing or exhausting? I am so far along in my journey through Anderson’s oeuvre of intricate whimsy that the films exist less in contrast with other cinema than in a hermetically sealed sarcophagus where they swirl together and break apart like intermingling amoeba. Benicio del Toro starring here as Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda feels less like its own choice and more like an an equal an opposite reaction to how surprisingly well he fit into the Anderson ecosystem in a smaller yet leading role in The French Dispatch, two features earlier. Imagine being able to grapple with in shorn of that context.

In the early nineteen-fifties, Zsa-Zsa is a shady businessmen whose spent a lifetime making questionable deals that have earned him countless enemies. Surviving assassination attempts is second nature to him. In what feels like a variation on the one-last-job trope from heist movies, Zsa-Zsa needs to cajole his various partners in a boondoggle building project to contribute more money to address a budget shortfall resulting from some nefarious manipulations of the supply chain. It’s whole lot of plot to keep track of, so Anderson helps out by occasionally updating progress with a sort of running scoreboard. The quest is also basically incidental, there to set up Zsa-Zsa’s string of encounters with colorful characters played by new and old members of Anderson’s absurdly talented troupe. The returners include Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, and Scarlett Johansson. Amusing as it always is to see how Anderson rearranges his favorite, few of those characters really click. Their appearances are too brief and their eccentricities too broad or sketchily defined.

The Phoenician Scheme does better by its main trio. Zsa-Zsa is joined in these travels by his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton), who is on the verge of becoming a nun, and Bjørn (Michael Cera), who is initially employed as a entomology student for Zsa-Zsa’s battalion of young sons and is enlisted to be a traveling assistant instead. Within the more fanciful trappings, there’s a welcome emotional weight to the father-daughter relationship, largely attributable to Threapleton’s sharp, magnetic performance as a young woman gradually adjusting her well-earned resentments. On the flip of that, Cera’s turn is a goofball delight that’s filled with line readings that flutter like knuckleballs.

Nearly thirty years past the release of Anderson’s debut feature, his style has solidified so completely that there’s only the finest of lines between rehash and fresh invention. The Phoenician Scheme sits squarely on that border. It’s neither a joyful variation nor a bland copy of what’s come before. It’s just straightforward Wes Anderson cinema, made to satisfy the disciples with no apparent aspirations to convert the skeptics. It is what it is.