Greed is good, but the satire’s too scattergun
Greed Cert: 161 hr 44mins ★★★★★
By and large, I rather admire the film career carved out by Steve Coogan, an actor to whom there’s always been more than the admittedly ridiculously funny Alan Partridge. He was a revelation in 24 Hour Party People, very good in Philomena, and should have won awards for his outstanding performance as Stan Laurel in Stan & Ollie.
And he’s pretty good here too, as he teams up with regular collaborator Michael Winterbottom to play Sir Richard McCreadie, a fictional fashion tycoon with enough resemblance to the real-life and much-vilified Arcadia boss Philip Green to have caused anxious lawyers more than a few sleepless nights.
But it’s also a film scarred by real-life tragedy, in that the very first shot we see is of the late Caroline Flack, playing herself as the hostess of a tacky, in-house awards ceremony at which Sir Richard will hand out prizes to his overworked employees and vulgarly present his own wife (Isla Fisher) with a dividend cheque for £1.2 billion.
But not before the perma-tanned old sleazebag has a good old leer at Flack. ‘Looking knockout in that Monda dress, Caroline,’ he purrs, referencing a fictional high-street brand – I shall leave you to name the real-life equivalent. It’s a line that might have raised a chuckle a few weeks ago but which is now so sad that a re-edit surely cannot be entirely ruled out. Especially as a fictional reality TV show – halfway between Made In Chelsea and Love Island – will later be woven into the already complex story.
Leaving that horribly unfortunate opening to one side, the first hour is good fun as Winterbottom, who writes and directs, adopts an energetic, semi-documentary style to tell the story of the rise and rise of Sir Richard, who ever since school has been known by the nickname Greedy McCreadie.
In the main time-line, his bullied and regularly humiliated personal staff are desperately struggling to put the final touches to a celebritypacked 60th birthday party on the island of Mykonos. ‘You can’t buy a view like that,’ he gloats as he
gazes from his harbourside terrace: ‘Oh wait, no… I have.’ Coogan is the past master at this sort of narcissistic, self-aggrandising monster.
In between scenes that see him screaming at the hapless Greek builder attempting to recreate the Colosseum in plywood and plaster, trying on his imperial toga and belittling his already emotionally damaged son (Asa Butterfield) there are flashbacks to his schooldays (look out for Jamie Blackley being seriously good as the young but already very unpleasant McCreadie), his early business career and a disastrous recent appearance before a House of Commons select committee.
Further punctuation comes courtesy of video interviews conducted by a hapless hack (David Mitchell, delivering exactly what you expect) commissioned to write a book that will clearly be more hagiography than biography. The problem is, he keeps on turning up seriously nasty stuff: the bullying, the exploitation, the financial chicanery…
In the end – indeed, some way before that – the film all becomes too much, despite a truly fabulous supporting turn from Shirley Henderson as Sir Richard’s terrifying Irish mother. Something that begins life as mocking satire driven by well-justified moral anger turns into a melodramatic cautionary tale aimed, like some sort of a cinematic scatter-gun, at targets that range from tax havens to the treatment of refugees, from sweatshop labour conditions to corporate asset-stripping. As the dramatic improbabilities mount, you can’t help thinking that most of the targets are missed. Shame.
‘The film all becomes too much, despite a fabulous turn from Shirley Henderson’