Mark Reviews Movies: GREED (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan) is not a good man. He has the nickname "Greedy McCreadie," which he gave to himself as a teenager in school for the way he would trounce his classmates at cards. After many business failures (and many on top of those), Richard has somehow become wealthy and famous—the latter mostly because of how rich and hated he is. His 60th birthday is approaching, and he wants a party that will show off how rich and famous he is.

That's the basic setup of writer/director Michael Winterbottom's Greed, a movie that wants to make Richard so hateful and detestable that his eventual, inevitable comeuppance—guaranteed to arrive from at least one of the people who have good reason to despise him—feels satisfyingly eventual and inevitable. In theory, this might make for a good joke. Winterbottom, though, is determined to do and say a lot more with this movie than giving us a simple setup and nasty punch line. He ends up tripping over his own ambitions.

The downfall starts, perhaps, with the ambition of the screenplay, which isn't content to establish Richard's character during a specific time and place—namely, in the days leading up to his birthday bash on a Greek island. By the way, he wants the party to have the theme of ancient Rome, which just adds a layer of amusing ignorance and incompetence to his other, less-than-admirable qualities.

Winterbottom sets a slew of players in place as the party approaches. Richard lords over—with either apathy or pure venom—his personal staff and a crew of local contractors trying to build a historically accurate amphitheater (for gladiatorial games, featuring a lion, in his honor) in a matter of days. While that unfolds, we also meet his family, his employees, and, most important to the story as an objective observer, his personally selected biographer.

The family consists of Richard's mother Margaret (Shirley Henderson), who seems to have raised her son into his judgmental side and sense of entitlement, and his ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher), who has become so comfortable in wealth that she seems aloof as to how fabulously wealthy she actually is. Richard's daughter Lily (Sophie Cookson) is equally aloof, filming a scripted "reality" TV show and deciding to take a Method approach to her performance—always in character, who is, in theory and in fact, herself. A younger son named Finn (Asa Butterfield) is the black sheep of the family, and upon arriving in Greece, he develops a morbid fascination with the myth of Oedipus.

Also there are Amanda (Dinita Gohil), who once worked for one of Richard's many failed fashion enterprises and now works as a personal assistant, and Nick (David Mitchell), the man Richard has hired to write his life story and who has learned that he isn't a good person in the process. There are others, too, such as Richard's new and younger girlfriend Naomi (Shanina Shaik), those local workers, and a group of Syrian refugees, who are living on the public beach outside the resort where the party will be held. In one of his multiple selfish and inhumane acts, he suckers the leader of the refugees with a game of three-card Monte—not only kicking them off the beach, but also getting them to finish construction on the central set piece.

Some of this is amusing in a wickedly satirical sense (When celebrities start dropping out of attending the party, Richard has one of his underlings hire impersonators—even of one singer who's dead). Some of it is intentionally infuriating. As a whole, though, the material has one common thread: None of it has any time to really breathe.

Winterbottom, in his clear effort to push us toward that second reaction, transforms the isolated story of the party preparation into a biography of his fictional billionaire. We see his days at school as a teenager, what should be his entrepreneurial end by way of a string of failed stores, his momentary salvation in learning that overseas sweatshops can get him clothing on the cheap, and his rise to wealthy, by means of making a personal profit on businesses that are doomed to collapse.

The point, obviously, isn't just to show us how bad of a man Richard is. Winterbottom wants to explain that fact—from the start, essentially, and up until this point—in thorough and complicated detail. Almost no stone is left unturned—from profiting off terrible working conditions, to shady but legal financial moves, to tax havens.

It's such a barrage of information, though, that the cruel, uncaring, and egotistical nature of the character is lost in the morass of exposition and secondary characters. Winterbottom wants us to be angry for many reasons, and during a coda filled with statistics, he makes sure to emphasize those reasons. By the end, Greed has so overshadowed Richard's story that we lose track of why we should be mad at him in the first place.

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