Greed, review: Steve Coogan's satire of the filthy rich is torn between lecturing and sniggering
Dir: Michael Winterbottom. Cast: Steve Coogan, David Mitchell, Isla Fisher, Dinita Gohil, Tim Key, Shirley Henderson, Sophie Cookson, Shanina Sheik, Asa Butterfield, Sarah Solemani, Asim Chaudri. Cert: TBC. Time: 104 min.
The name of Steve Coogan’s narcissistic billionaire in Greed, widely believed to be broadly modelled on high-street fashion mogul Sir Philip Green, gives you that sinking feeling. It’s Sir Rich “Greedy” McCready.
He sounds like a bad character Martin Amis might have devised in his early career, when he was writing books called Success or Money. McCready is very much a product of that greed-is-good epoch. In Winterbottom’s flailing satire, he’s about to celebrate his 60th birthday in ludicrous style, by dragging a host of celebrities out for a toga party on Mykonos, where he’s custom-building an amphitheatre for the occasion. And renting a lion.
“The Monet of money,” they call him – the script doesn’t let up with this stuff – and the multi-millionaire Steve Coogan, who parodies his own aura of smug wealth so deftly in Winterbottom’s TV series The Trip, merely has to push that up a notch. His McCready is all gleaming false teeth and tyrannical disgust, but he’s too feebly sketched to be worth a whole film.
A group of refugees have had the bad taste to pitch up on the beach nearby, and Sir Rich wants them removed in time for the fiesta, which may feature Elton John, or Shakira, or just Tom Jones if he wants to save a few bob. Meanwhile, his chippy Irish ma (an aged-up Shirley Henderson), plasticky ex-wife (Isla Fisher) and glum son (Asa Butterfield) hang around waiting for the film to give them any meaningful function. A useless journalist called Nick (David Mitchell) also loiters in their midst, gathering tidbits for a forthcoming biography and getting the odd laugh.
As well as a comedy, Greed wants to be an angry exposé on the rank profiteering and sweatshop exploitation that some high-street names have built their brands on. There are detours to Sri Lanka, where Sir Rich is shown building his empire from the bottom up, by remorseless haggling with factory owners, who pay their garment workers something in the region of £4 per day.
A building even collapses, in a hard-hitting flashback presumably modelled on the 2013 disaster in Bangladesh. But if this world-news messaging sounds like an unlikely tonal companion to the broad farce of a billionaire’s birthday, it truly is: the tacky extravagance and the harrowing context don’t collide to make a point, but simply belong in different films.
Winterbottom fails to make the jokes serve his subject, instead tossing out hit-and-miss riffs about reality TV, then a weak montage about McCready’s tax avoidance, then a funny but self-contained attack on celebrity impersonators not meeting his standards. The film winds up torn in half – it’s both a classroom lecture on global inequities and the snickering students at the back of the class, who think strenuous irony is the right response. Without doubt, the Winterbottom-Coogan partnership had its glory days. But Greed is not good.
Greed is part of the 2019 BFI London Film Festival, and will be released in UK cinemas on November 22
