NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE EXCESS
Versatile director uses comedy to make a much more serious point
Watch the films of British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom and you might conclude there are in fact two directors sharing the name. One is behind the 2005 comedy Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and the various Trip movies — 2011’s The Trip, 2014’s The Trip to Italy, 2017’s The Trip to Spain — in which Coogan and Brydon motor through bits of Europe, sampling the food and engaging in duelling James Bond impressions.
The other and far more serious Winterbottom works in documentaries, docudramas and thrillers about political and economic inequity in the world — The Road to Guantanamo, A Mighty Heart, The Emperor’s New Clothes, etc. The two sides of the director collide in his newest, Greed. On the one hand it’s a comedy starring Coogan as a wealthy fashion entrepreneur preparing to celebrate his 60th
birthday with a lavish party on the Greek island of Mykonos. On the other — well, let’s just say Winterbottom’s sympathies lie with those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Coogan plays Sir Richard Mccreadie — dubbed Greedy Mccredie by the press, he seems if anything proud of the nickname. He has a beautiful ex-wife (Isla Fisher), a new model (Shanina Shaik) and three feckless offspring, the youngest of whom openly muses about the violent side of his Oedipal complex.
He is also surrounded by a retinue of yes men, of whom the yessiest is his biographer, played by Peep Show’s David Mitchell. You can see it in the character’s eyes: He’s sold his soul, and the rest of his life is not so much existence as a prelude to eternal damnation. Winterbottom’s screenplay, written with Veep’s Sean Gray, bounces through time, dramatizing Richard’s rise to power during the Thatcher years, and finding him more recently answering questions of a Parliamentary committee looking into his finances.
But most of the film takes place in the present day, as Richard orders the construction of a coliseum for his Roman-themed party. He’s troubled by the presence on a nearby public beach of a bunch of unkempt Syrian refugees, and demands their removal. “It’s not me,” he says. “It’s my guests. Some of them are very shallow.”
The tone is classic Winterbottom, by which I mean both of him. On the comic side, construction of the coliseum keeps falling further behind schedule, with all the Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day platitudes that implies. “He’s going to f---ing crucify me!” one of his assistants wails, at which point the phlegmatic Greek foreman suggests that could be part of the entertainment.
But Coogan’s character is a brusque, bullying boor, of which we see ample evidence in the way he treats his family members, employees and business partners. In one scene reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s recent corporate crime drama The Laundromat, Mitchell’s character sits through an explanation of how Richard bought a fashion chain with, essentially, its own money.
The two moods don’t always co-exist easily, and the film hits some very dark notes indeed, as when it visits a Sri Lankan sweatshop and explores a tragedy that took place there. A post-credits rush of onscreen factoids about wealth inequality also feel somewhat heavy-handed.
But if you like a little moral outrage with your chuckles, Greed should satisfy. And if you’re a fan of the purely funny Winterbottom, stay tuned. The director has a fourth Trip instalment opening in Britain on the same day that Greed hits Canada, and no doubt arriving on screens here before the year is out. Fittingly, given Greed’s setting, Coogan and Brydon’s newest comic journey will be
The Trip to Greece.