Michael Winterbottom does his best Adam McKay impression with “Greed,” an abrasive pseudo-documentary about the global domino effects of corporate-caliber hubris that the English writer-director mostly encourages us to witness lightheartedly until turning the tables on his own satirical tale with implications so real and immediate that you wonder why he didn’t focus his storytelling lens on them in the first place.
Instead, “Greed” is largely motivated on Richard McCreadie’s rise to power as a pompous, fiscally-dubious retail mogul, using the guise of interview-gathering to revisit portions of a life that has always sought the cheapest way to get the most lucrative payout. The movie echoes “Vice” and “The Big Short” with its time-hopping structure and journalist-detective character of Nick (David Mitchell), who works to piece together an explanation of how expertly McCreadie has gamed the system so as to afford a destination birthday in Greece that features the construction of a gladiatorial arena and a live lion (yes, the metaphor only gets more astute as the movie goes on). The fourth wall remains structurally intact in “Greed,” and its educative tangents are cohesive and coherent enough, but the fact these scenes are so scant makes me wonder if a straight documentary – and a straighter filmmaking agenda – might have been more effective.
But then we wouldn’t have the ridiculous McCreadie, a Gordon Ramsay-esque caricature as well as a flesh-and-blood warning of familiar magnitude. Played to appropriately vile levels by a coked-out Steve Coogan, we’re eerily familiar with the fictional character, who Winterbottom has written as an amalgam of everything we’ve come to glean about dysfunctional billionaire CEOs from negative news headlines—Coogan embodies the diabolical carelessness of a 2000s Will Ferrell character at the helm of a major corporation (along with every horrible implication that that entails). “I don’t do what I can do; I only do what I can do,” McCreadie says at one point; ironically, all he can sometimes do is unleash nuclear-level tirades in the face of store managers while continuing to coast by on the minor issue of major tax evasion.
Who’s on the receiving end of such business malpractice and Winterbottom’s vitriol? It isn’t just McCreadie, but his entire family—made up of characters so acidic that it’s a wonder the Greece sunshine doesn’t betray the green that runs through their veins. Winterbottom delights in a snapshot approach of each relative who believes they’re entitled to excess ad infinitum, though their larger roles in “Greed” are impossible to pinpoint beyond portraying the brush strokes of entitlement as a hereditary trait, despite the best efforts of Isla Fisher, playing McCreadie’s former partner, and Asa Butterfield, playing his son, to inject some pathos into the story when it begins to get weary. There are some great supporting performances in "Greed," but they just as much provide an opportunity to make the movie even leaner than it is.
For how much “Greed” tries to break down modern systems of capitalist dollar-wringing and shortcut-taking, these scenes are too inconsistent to make you think they were Winterbottom’s endgame. Instead the movie feels mostly like Winterbottom scratching an itch by jabbing the incredibly indulgent McCreadies in the side as much as he can, making the screenplay overly reliant on charades and not consequences. Winterbottom makes easy targets of his characters, and their complete lack of humility makes for funny asides, especially as individual performances further lean into the hysterical.
But there’s little to push the viewer past the idea of a warped agenda. Frantic and somewhat shoddy editing keeps the pace from becoming a slog, but it also tends to results in confusion rather than revelation; moreover, the movie struggles to compromise its jaunty tone with a lack of storytelling precision. The reaction you can expect to feel watching the McCreadies is revulsion, not far from what other recent position-of-power movies like “Ready or Not” or “Bombshell” have provided.
How exactly Winterbottom want us to compartmentalize that revulsion is up for debate. Should we lament how McCreadie’s superiority complex acts like a parasite, perhaps making those working for him just as morally complicit? Are we meant to condemn how the emperor of a failing (fictional) retail dynasty could care less about his position, so long as he can afford to nab Shakira for his Greek island extravaganza? Winterbottom provides no guidepost – no barometer of tension – until the final 15 or so minutes of the movie, when “Greed” takes a sudden pivot toward the real-world fallout of McCreadie’s practices that unfolld Sri Lanka sweatshops, where mothers he’s never met are cut loose from their jobs so consumers can buy a cheap pair of jeans halfway around he world.
It’s enough to make the ending of “Greed” feel like a different movie altogether, one that trades a desire to make the audience laugh for a call to the audience to do our damn research. Winterbottom has done that for us, too—the film ends with an avalanche of statistics, culminating with how the world’s 28 richest people have as much money as the poorest 3.8 billion. The factoid will never not be a jarring one, though Winterbottom’s journey to reach it feels even more disjointed after the fact, when most of the movie has focused on the cartoonishness of Coogan’s curse-spouting billionaire. You could say “Greed” got a bit greedy with its subject.
"Greed" is rated R for pervasive language and brief drug use
Starring: Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, Shirley Henderson, David Mitchell
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
2020
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