Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme.
Wes Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox opens with Mr. Fox and his wife standing beside a tree, silhouetted in golden light. They hold hands, wild yet civilized, dressed in tidy clothes that nod to decades past, a Walkman attached to Mr. Fox’s 1970s suit and Mrs. Fox decked out in flower child garb. A simple tune plays as they consider whether to steal fowl from a nearby farm. The entire moment is bathed in warm, storybook hues: autumn leaves, patterned fields, ticking clocks, all in perfect symmetry. In just a few frames, Anderson signals that this is not a world of chaos, but of order, one with rituals, consequences, and everyday beauty.
Whimsy may be his medium, but Anderson’s films are anything but frivolous. Beneath the symmetrical compositions, corduroy costumes, and retro palettes lies a cinematic collection attuned to what can be called the conservative imagination—not a partisan agenda, but a disposition toward the world. At its core, the conservative imagination is marked by a reverence for the permanent things: beauty, order, tradition, the mystery of the human soul, and the weight of inherited forms. It assumes that the world is not raw material to be endlessly remade, but a given reality to be received, stewarded, and, at times, redeemed.
Nowhere is this imagination clearer than in The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s latest and most spiritually ambitious work. The film centers on the fictional Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), a self-made arms dealer whose empire, family, and identity are collapsing. After a brush with death and a vision of the afterlife, Korda sets out to reconnect with Liesl (Mia Threapleton), his estranged daughter and a novice nun. As they journey across Korda’s fading empire, it is Liesl’s quiet faith, forged in tradition and disciplined by ritual, that becomes the moral axis of the film. She does not fight her father, but forms him through her resistance to his immoral inclinations and insistence upon a moral order.
This is the conservative imagination at work: the belief that true transformation does not come by rejecting the past, but by reinterpreting and reclaiming it. Korda is not destroyed by his failures, nor is he saved by radical reinvention. He converts to his daughter’s Catholic faith—slowly, painfully—through encounter, memory, and the enduring pressure of love. The film ends not with triumph, but with quiet reconciliation: Korda and Liesl run a small bistro in an unknown city, embodying a Benedictine rhythm of prayer and work. Grace descends not in spectacle, but in the form of a meal shared, a card game played, a daughter forgiving her father.
This threading of the conservative imagination is not unique to The Phoenician Scheme. Reconciliation, ritual, and redemption reverberate across Anderson’s broader filmography, from the elegiac to the playful.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s popular 2014 film, is a eulogy for a vanished world of manners, beauty, and moral codes—one preserved not through ideology, but through memory and storytelling. At the center of that film stands Monsieur Gustave, the meticulous concierge who resembles a kind of secular monk: precise, devoted, flawed, and ultimately redemptive. Throughout the film, this can be seen in how Gustave tells Zero, his protégé, to “anticipate the client’s needs before the needs are needed,” and the mutual understanding between the older man and younger one that the Grand Budapest Hotel is an “institution,” and to treat it as such. The film’s plot and aesthetic read as Anderson’s elegy for Gustave, the hotel’s decline after his murder, and indeed the conservative imagination itself—a world where form carried moral weight, where elegance was a form of duty, and where beauty was, in the deepest sense, a kind of justice.
Similar themes abound in Moonrise Kingdom, a 2012 film that captures Anderson’s quiet fixation on pilgrimage as a search for belonging. The adolescents Suzy and Sam don’t run away from home to reject the world, but to find a place within it—a space where loyalty, order, and love might finally take root. Anderson treats their innocence with moral seriousness, not sentimentality, and the makeshift church they construct on the beach becomes both literal sanctuary and symbolic altar. Through their journey, Anderson suggests that reconciliation often begins with the young and the displaced, and that chosen family and intergenerational care are not replacements for tradition but restorations of it. If The Phoenician Scheme is a late-life conversion, Moonrise Kingdom is a life’s annunciation—a tender, half-lit vision of a world made whole by the very ones it forgot.
Though animated and outwardly playful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a meditation on masculinity, vocation, and the weight of responsibility. Mr. Fox’s arc mirrors Korda’s: a restless patriarch learning to reorient his talents away from self-glory and toward love, duty, and domestic fidelity. The tension between wild self-expression and quiet obligation animates the story, culminating in a kind of reconciliation—with spouse, child, and community—all forged through humble labor. In Anderson’s world, even burrows and stolen chickens take on the character of ritual; the domestic is sacred, and the shared meal becomes a site of grace. Like Korda, Mr. Fox does not shed his flaws but is slowly reformed by love. Fatherhood, in both cases, becomes a kind of penance, and grace arrives in a humble burrow.
The Royal Tenenbaums, from 2001, is also reminiscent of Korda, focused as it is on Royal Tenenbaum, a morally compromised patriarch stumbling through the fragile work of reconnecting with his estranged children. Here, as in The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson explores the possibility of grace even for the selfish and broken, offering not clean slates, but the hard-earned chance to be seen differently. The children, wounded yet willing, become agents of moral reorientation, and the family’s healing unfolds not through grand gestures, but through small, stubborn acts of recognition. Royal’s failures remain; his repentance arrives late. Yet Anderson grants him what so few modern narratives allow: the dignity of contrition, and the quiet miracle of forgiveness—not because he deserves it, but because someone chooses to see him not as what he was, but as what he might yet become.
The conservative imagination is alive in these films, not because they are reactionary, but because they believe that what is old may still be holy, and what is beautiful may yet save us. In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by irony, fragmentation, and the cult of the self, Anderson’s films stand as quiet affirmations of an older moral vision. Against the self-fashioning of, say, Greta Gerwig’s heroines or the bleak determinism of the Coen brothers’ universe, Anderson offers something at once gentler and more demanding: a world where the soul is shaped by memory, grace is mediated through form, and beauty still carries moral weight. If the conservative imagination is, at heart, an act of faithful attention—to what is given, what is broken, and what might be saved—then Anderson is one of its most enchanting modern storytellers.
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