If and when you think about director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan, you think about The Trip franchise. If you go deeper down the rabbit hole, you may think of Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. I have not seen 24 Hour Party People so I would not think of it. When I heard of Greed, I immediately thought it was their second stab at The Look of Love, a dull, earnest, straight forward biographical movie about Paul Raymond. If your biopic is boring even with drug fueled orgies, maybe stop going back to that particular well. I put the film in my queue because at least the preview seemed funny, but there was no way that I was going to see it in theaters. Well, it was only in theaters for a week before the global pandemic hit so I was fashion forward by adding it to my queue early on.
Do you know how messed up the world is? Winterbottom and Coogan, who comfortably have been making films about successful, aging, spiritually hungry, narcissistic, messy, attention seeking men for almost two decades, decided to take their powers and attempt to make a difference by making their version of The Big Short with Greed. Is it as seamlessly amazing as The Big Short? No, not every comedian can pull an Adam McKay the first time around, but I grade on curves, and I appreciate the effort and heart even if the result is overly ambitious and not a perfect blend. They aimed to take down the inhumane business practices of the fashion industry and castigate the wealthy for failing as good civic citizens, but skewered the concepts of fame and entertainment. They tried.
Greed is a genuinely funny movie. It is satire in the vein of a Christopher Guest comedy. While Coogan is clearly the star, the entire movie rests on the shoulders of an ensemble, and the characters’ routine relationship dynamics, which get established very rapidly and early, are continuously riffed on and revisited throughout the film. Even if you do not care about what Winterbottom and Coogan are trying to accomplish, you will be very entertained. The film is about a fashion mogul, Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie, preparing for his lavish 60th birthday party as a public way to counter testifying before a Parliamentary Select Committee to answer for his financial dealings and the effect that it has on the British people though the film goes on to show the global effect.
Greed sports a lot of sloppy and tropey narrative techniques that I despise yet I did not mind it in this context. The film starts with the overly used how we got here trope, but because it leaves enough history regarding what the disaster was, it does not completely leach the suspense from the film though it is obvious as the movie unfolds what will probably happen. I dutifully lined up the Rube Goldbergian elements as they appeared. The story is not told in chronological order. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, but because the film has the feel of a fake documentary, it is not confusing since it is thematically chronological in terms of documenting the party with remarks at the party being used as jumping points to go deeper into raised themes and explore Greedy’s past. It follows the logic of hyperlink cinema while not completely adhering to the genre. Overall the film is clearly a movie with an omniscient camera that sees everything, but huge swaths are excerpts from an amateur documentary that Nick, Greedy’s authorized author biography, filmed as a kind of bonus for the party, a vanity project to fluff up his employer’s public persona. It is easy as a viewer to lose yourself and think that the film’s narrative is interchangeable with the fictional biography, but you would be wrong since we see the rough footage, not just the authorized cut. This point could be easily missed, but is crucial to the point of the film. There is a difference between the film and the documentary, which is controlled by who funds it, Greedy. Nick knows the rules of the game and muzzles himself for his employer, which seemed more sadly realistic than our internal cheerleader urging him to make an expose, which ultimately would make the same amount of difference as the government hearings. There are predetermined tracks of narrative that play out—public, impotent castigation of the tycoon, the reverential expert or intimate interview analyzing the tycoon, but ultimately the unstoppable, gaping maw wins.
Greed works because it is a dynamic, vigorous film in terms of editing and acting. The camera is always moving. The acting and dialogue is very snappy in a classic Hollywood vein. Every character is memorable and distinct even the lowliest ones. It is also a gorgeous film. Winterbottom loves capturing idyllic scenes of luxury, and his entire film career may be devoted to getting paid to work in countries that he and his friends want to visit—in this case Greece. It is the case of having your cake and eating it. He succeeds at making us disgusted at the excess, but it is pleasurable to virtually consume it. While Greedy is a horrible, insensitive, shallow human being whom no one should admire or emulate, it is fun to watch a crass, critical human being with zero brakes just riff. I have read descriptions of the character as Trumpian, which I absolutely disagree because the character has a reptilian, practical genius in the way that he survives and can spot then excise others’ mistakes. When he realizes that his vanity project will probably not get completed in time for his party, he ruthlessly and silently steps in to find a way to complete it that no one would or should consider. In his own way, you can see how his humanity as he silently rationalizes why his solution is a win win, but is it still appalling? Absolutely. He is like a soulless Gordon Ramsey. Coogan injects enough humanity, desperation and vulnerability in his character to keep it impossible to hate him and see why some people would like the magnificent bastard while also making it apparent that he is not to be admired. It is a tricky tightrope to make someone a buffoon in spite of being the smartest person in the room.
Shirley Henderson definitely steals every scene in Greed as Greedy’s Irish immigrant, working class origins mother in the vein of Michelle Yeoh’s Crazy Rich Asian protective, flinty matriarch. Through her, you can see how determination and crass survival warped into excess and not knowing when enough is enough. Henderson is a terrific actor, but side eye that she has to play Coogan’s mother, whom she is younger than.
Greed fails because it wants to bring serious awareness to many important issues, but in the story, it feels more like an afterthought than the focal point: the Syrian refugee crisis, lack of safety regulations for clothing factory workers, corporate raiders, tax avoidance and undocumented labor. At the eleventh hour, a woman of color character gets a backstory to help move us closer to the denouement, but it also seems like a convenient generational plot device as if she was a composite character. While I liked her, her storyline was too convenient. It felt like a cathartic, dramatic way to diffuse the implications of the conclusion so critics could not quite pin a Rosseau, anti-capitalist label on the film. It was melodramatic and reminded me of The Help as if certain naturalized people cannot be inherently trusted. I also do not think that you go from one particular job to the next.
I enjoyed Greed and highly recommend it. If I saw it in theaters, I may be less enthusiastic, but as a home viewer, I think that it is the perfect mix of entertaining and educational without feeling like homework. Winterbottom and Coogan still need to do a lot of work if they want to reach The Big Short’s level of incisive documentary level style expose wrapped in a biographical, dramatic comedy, but it is a good first-time entry in the genre. This film is allegedly loosely based on Philip Green, the chairman of the Arcadia Group. I am unfamiliar with either so I cannot address whether they nail the object of their ridicule.
