From supermodels to soggy sandwiches
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened Netflix ★★★★★
Fyre Festival has a lot to offer a documentary director. The most disastrous non-event of 2017, it combined mass opulence (some ticket packages cost $250,000), a maniacal con man in co-founder Billy Mcfarland (who created the event alongside rapper Ja Rule), and the greatest scapegoat of our time: millennials. What’s more, the whole sorry affair was captured in real time, due to that generation’s obsession with sharing their lives on social media.
Where Netflix’s 90-minute film, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, succeeds is in revealing the behind-thescenes events, lending them a greater pathos than might have been expected.
In April 2017, thousands of affluent young Americans excitedly boarded planes to Miami. It was the first stop on a journey to an event that had promised to be the most exclusive of its kind, stuffed with supermodels, served by private jets and soundtracked by headliners Blink-182 and Major Lazer – all on a deserted island previously owned by the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. When they were subsequently dropped off near Sandals Resort on Great Exuma – not a desert island but the largest of the cays in the Bahamas – they were greeted by a smattering of sodden tents, endless queues of inebriated festival-goers and, if they were lucky, a damp cheese sandwich. The ticketholders became an international laughing stock online and, the film reveals, prompted the FBI to make inquiries. Mcfarland wound up being sentenced to six years in jail.
A wide range of people go on the record, including the Bahamian caterer who, heartbreakingly, was forced to use her life savings to pay the bills that Mcfarland failed to. Such events mean that the film’s director, Chris Smith, does not have to struggle for plot. But while the scenes of the festival’s opening – when attendees realise what they have let themselves in for and Mcfarland finally lets his Teflon-coated positivity slide – unfold with the pacy doom of a thriller, there is arguably more to be found from the interviews with nearly everybody that Mcfarland managed to woo into working with him (except Ja Rule).
Where the film falls down is in its portrayal of Mcfarland, who is presented as a buffoon. Had Smith been able to capture the sheer power of this crook’s allure (to which all Mcfarland’s former colleagues testify), it would have given Fyre a far more vital depth.
What does emerge, though, is that Mcfarland never really thought Fyre Festival would be what it pretended to be. “We are selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” he cackles, sitting on the beach during a promotional shoot. Available on Netflix now