The Manhattan hotel at which I'm interviewing Wes Anderson has striking views of Central Park out of its windows. Looming a little more ominously, however, is the Trump International Hotel and Tower, one of the president's many jutting edifices dotted around the globe. I wouldn't have noted it, except that Anderson's new film, The Phoenician Scheme, is about a tycoon with hands in many pots: arms dealing, manufacturing, large-scale infrastructure projects. In conceiving the character'a businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda (played by Benicio del Toro)'the director told me that he was thinking of a more old-fashioned type of European magnate, in the vein of Aristotle Onassis or Gianni Agnelli. But 'I think that everything's filtering in,' he allowed with a chuckle. 'We're all reading the same newspapers.' Anderson has (unfairly) earned a reputation as a maker of fidgety little cinematic dioramas, meticulously designed but hermetically sealed off from reality. But his work is clearly...
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