TT 527: THE REHEARSAL, Season two
plus MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE -- THE FINAL RECKONING and THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME. Airplanes are the leitmotif.
There are six episodes of Nathan Fielder’s latest, a second season of The Rehearsal. While the first season was absolutely wonderful, the second is simply beyond the beyond. I suppose if you woke me up in the dead of night, put me under an interrogation lamp, and roughly demanded to know the greatest thing I have ever seen on television, I’d have to answer, “The second season of The Rehearsal.”
Fielder is making truly challenging art that directly interfaces with the current condition. The conventional literary idiom “doubling down” proves to be insufficient when discussing the progression from the first scene to last. We need a new phrase—perhaps a phrase that alludes to unchecked exponential growth—to describe Fielder’s commitment to unlikely and unexpected behavior.
Plane travel is part of The Rehearsal. Plane travel is also part of Mission: Impossible— The Final Reckoning. However, compared to the chills and thrills of The Rehearsal, the current M:I is a decidedly lukewarm affair. I even sort of zoned out and stopped paying attention during the long climatic plane chase, maybe I was thinking about when to do my laundry or something.
The submarine sequence was admittedly pretty good.
In the end, the complete and utter deification of Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt as a Jesus Christ-level savior is hard for me to take. Everything else in the movie is also so on the nose, with no hint of thematic or emotional complexity. All details were adjusted through a focus group. It is as smooth as a ball bearing. “Can every single frame of this very long action movie be understood by everyone instantly?”
The film is not very funny, either. The previous installments directed by Christopher McQuarrie seemed a bit more amusing.
The budget for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning was 400 million dollars. The budget for Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, was 30 million.
Looking at the two review threads on Reddit (Mission: Impossible, Phoenician), one gets the general impression that Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning has received better reviews than The Phoenician Scheme. In at least one case, that is exactly what happened: Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave M:I 5 stars and Phoenician 3 stars. Again, one cost 400 million and the other 30 million, which suggests that Bradshaw is conflating price with quality.
Perhaps M:I is “too big to fail,” or perhaps corporate group think can actually be attractive to the critical establishment.
In conversation, Glenn Kenny pointed out that the complaint “Wes Anderson films are all artifice and therefore lack emotion” has become an active trope.
Glenn is right. From the Reddit review page of Phoenician:
“….At no point did any part of the plot touch me on an emotional level...”
“…Its flurry of mid-century design and rapid-fire exchanges feels like layers of painstakingly applied lacquer over human figures left barely visible by the process…”
“…Ratchets the whimsy to such an extent that you feel a much greater distance from the goings-on…”
“…A sleepy, drippy affair with no emotional centre at its core…”
“…For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets, this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass….”
“…Its major attraction is the whimsy with which it is decorated, or suffused, or infested...”
“…Drama, which is kept at such a vast ironic distance that it frequently disappears…”
Here on Substack, Sophie of The Final Scene (a critic I admire) bitterly complained: “For God's sake, Wes. We know you can center a shot. Now show us you still remember how to make us feel something besides déjà vu.”
What can I say? I was weeping in the final scene of The Phoenician Scheme. Copious tears poured down my cheeks, and I sat through the credits in kind of a stunned awe.
Maybe I’m just a softy…or maybe some of the received wisdom of critical consensus is just being too hard on one of our greatest filmmakers.
Possibly it is a sort of flex. Critics can’t do much harm to the big franchises, but Anderson is potentially vulnerable, although he certainly isn’t costing the studio top dollar. As with the two other entertainments discussed here, plane travel is also a part of The Phoenician Scheme, and there are even three plane crashes. Eventually this becomes a recurring joke, but the point of impact is never filmed, the audience just sees a bit of wreckage lying around in the aftermaths, an inexpensive trick that went out of fashion decades ago. (The way Anderson treats plane crashes as a lo-fi throwaway—in 2025!—is amusing and on brand.)
Wes Anderson has never once attempted to please a committee. Is there some aspect of jealously involved? One of the last successful auteurs needs a spanking? (Even Tarantino seems to be more part of a studio process.)
Or maybe the haters are just genuinely tired of the aesthetic, which I guess is fair. However, in my view, we are just lucky that Wes Anderson is still making Wes Anderson movies. He does what he does, and God bless.
Musical note: The Phoenician Scheme boasts the most Stravinsky ever used in a mainstream film score. The source is mainly Firebird, there’s a little Petrushka, but Apollo also gets devastating play.
100% with you on Wes. A great welling of tears and something like pained joy at the beauty of that final scene.
Weird to see movie-loving critics who I also generally admire so hung up on WA’s style. It’s not his fault that most other filmmakers lack a distinctive one.
But more importantly, the strange failure to acknowledge that the characters don’t have to be “emotional” (in the typical naturalistic, method-derived style) for the movie to be full of emotion. Asteroid City laid this out in pretty programmatic fashion (“you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”) but again critics were strangely (lazily?) hung up on certain obvious features of his style. (Think also of Del Toro’s mad artist in the French Dispatch, who must draw a realistic sparrow for the art dealers to recognize his talent and to fully embrace the intentional nature of his more abstract style—it’s as if like these critics are berating Anderson for not sticking with realistic Sparrows)
When I go to the movies it’s always in the hope I will see something that will change my life. Same way I listen to a record, go to a concert or pick up a novel, or read a poem. Anderson—keeping things deep and strange, hilarious and so so sad—always seems to honor that impulse in a way that I am very grateful for.
thank you for defending this movie which touched my heart and also left me at the ending with a sudden, heaping half-sob i muffled. god it can feel hard to believe and hope. thanks