Flailing satire on greed that yields slim comic returns
Dir Michael Winterbottom Starring Steve Coogan, David Mitchell, Isla Fisher, Dinita Gohil, Tim Key, Shirley Henderson, Sophie Cookson, Shanina Sheik, Asa Butterfield
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 early in his 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 celebrities out for a toga party on Mykonos, where he’s 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 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, gathering titbits for a biography and getting the odd laugh.
As well as a comedy, Greed wants to be an angry exposé on the 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 by remorseless haggling with factory owners, who pay garment workers £4 per day.
A building even collapses, in a flashback presumably modelled on the 2013 disaster in Bangladesh. If it sounds like an unlikely tonal companion to the farce of a billionaire’s birthday, it truly is – and belongs in a different film.
Winterbottom fails to make the jokes serve his subject, instead tossing out hit-and-miss riffs about reality TV and tax avoidance. The film winds up torn in half – it’s both a classroom lecture on global inequities and the snickering students at the back, who think strenuous irony is the right response. The Winterbottom-coogan partnership had its glory days. But Greed is not good.