Greed – first look review

Low prices exact a high cost in Greed, Michael Winterbottom’s new satire train­ing its crosshairs on the fast-fash­ion indus­try. Every­thing nox­ious about cap­i­tal­is­tic prac­tice today finds a human ves­sel in Richard McCread­ie (Steve Coogan, out­fit­ted with blind­ing-white den­tures that put Jon­ah Hill’s teeth in The Wolf of Wall Street to shame), known to the many that loathe him as ​“McGreedy.”

He’s the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of an upward fail­ure, hav­ing dri­ven busi­ness after busi­ness into the ground at a side­ways prof­it to him­self. His one tru­ly suc­cess­ful enter­prise, a High Street com­peti­tor for the likes of H&M and Zara, only stays in the black through a com­bi­na­tion of cre­ative book­keep­ing and soul­less exploita­tion of fac­to­ry work­ers in Sri Lan­ka. He’s a blight on not just cou­ture but the world, and Win­ter­bot­tom takes devi­ous plea­sure in slow­ly met­ing out a come­up­pance as the mogul cel­e­brates his six­ti­eth birth­day with an obscene­ly lav­ish blowout in Mykonos.

The ruins dot­ting the Greek island inspire MacCready’s biog­ra­ph­er Nick (David Mitchell) to quote the famous line from Ozy­man­dias, but of course the ultra­wealthy don’t have the self-aware­ness to wor­ry about despair when look­ing upon their mighty works. Like so many hor­ri­ble boss­es, Mac­Cready prefers to issue unre­al­is­tic demands and let his under­lings fig­ure out how to make the impos­si­ble into the pos­si­ble, start­ing with the mas­sive amphithe­ater he needs whipped up in a jiffy. He intends it as a mon­u­ment to Glad­i­a­tor, his favorite film; it will soon morph into a sym­bol of hubris, a word Nick notes comes from the Greeks.

That’s where the Syr­i­an refugees hun­kered down on the adja­cent stretch of pub­lic beach come in. Winterbottom’s cri­tiques get more point­ed as he intro­duces a polit­i­cal dimen­sion that sticks Mac­Cready right in the mid­dle of the immi­gra­tion cri­sis. He essen­tial­ly con­scripts them into slav­ery through bribery that turns to decep­tion, at which point the par­ty tee­ter­ing on the brink of calami­ty starts to tip over.

Mac­Cready and his one-per­center ilk make an admit­ted­ly fat tar­get for Win­ter­bot­tom, who demon­strates that he’s put in the work through a gov­ern­men­tal depo­si­tion fram­ing the action with expla­na­tions of MacCready’s crimes and the loop­holes that allow him to get away with it all. He learned how to con suck­ers from a young age and sim­ply applied the same tech­niques to a macro­eco­nom­ic scale, but no amount of mon­ey could fill in the emp­ty space where his heart ought to be. At this point, it’s more about con­trol, the plea­sure of get­ting his way.

If only the comedic touch­es could attain the Ian­nuc­ci lev­els of vit­ri­olic hilar­i­ty they’re shoot­ing for, even with Veep writer Sean Gray doing touch-ups. Most of the best bits go to MacCreadie’s ex-wife (Isla Fish­er) and pale Oedi­pal son (Asa But­ter­field), as Coogan him­self large­ly plays the straight man while snip­ing the one-lin­ers served to him. Oth­er sub­plots eat up time with­out yield­ing any bel­ly-bust­ing moments, such as the real­i­ty TV crew fol­low­ing around MacCreadie’s fam­i­ly or the lunges at pathos through an under­ling (Dini­ta Gohil) with a per­son­al con­nec­tion to the inhu­mane fac­to­ry con­di­tions in the devel­op­ing world.

Win­ter­bot­tom keeps his mind on his mon­ey, drop­ping the ham­mer dur­ing a cred­it sequence that rat­tles off shock­ing sta­tis­tics about the con­tin­u­ing abuse of fac­to­ry work­ers and metas­ta­siz­ing of income inequal­i­ty. It’s a right­eous fury, but by that point, it’s also the main thing this oft-tri­fling film has going for it. McCread­ie learns the hard way that some things can’t be bought; the cathar­sis of that par­tic­u­lar les­son amounts to its own kind of enter­tain­ment, less out­right uproar­i­ous than satisfying.