It’s fair to say that these days, there is no villain more easily lambasted than those who occupy the infamous 1%. Enter Greed, which has a fairly easy target in Steve Coogan’s portrayal of Richard “Greedy” McCreadie, a fictional fast fashion mogul. Greed follows McCreadie and his friends, colleagues, and family, including ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) and biographer Nick (David Mitchell) as they gather in Greece for his over-the-top 60th birthday celebration. McCreadie is still licking his wounds after some negative political publicity, and he uses the occasion as an attempt to help restore his image, preparing for a lavish party complete with servants, celebrities, a Roman coliseum, and a live lion.
Greed tries to do a lot, which is fitting, and fails to succeed because of that broadness – which, again, is fitting. That’s not to say the film is an outright miss: there’s probably more than one excellent film lurking in the depths of writer/director Michael Winterbottom and co-writer Sean Gray’s script. But the tone and messaging of Greed are too expansive and ambitious to pay off in any singularly effective way.
In one way, Greed is a Big Short-esque film, using fictional people to tell a basically true story. McCreadie serves as an amalgamation of real-life figures, with the most direct corollaries being Topshop owner and billionaire Philip Green as well as Virgin tycoon Richard Branson. This is probably the film’s most successful endeavor. When Greed really zeroes in on McCreadie’s nasty business practices, particularly the ones that most echo real-world dealings of fast fashion conglomerates, it’s insightful and specific.
At its best, Greed helps us look closer at something we all sort of know is wrong, deep down – those cheap, disposable jeans we love to get on sale but loathe to consider the true human cost of producing. It also examines the way we can shrug off our participation in this kind of destruction by showing the long chain of events that link together to create it, with each person in the link able to shrug off full responsibility for their small action. After all, you just bought the jeans – and the store that sold you them just did the same thing – and the buyer that negotiated the rates with the manufacturer was just doing what everyone else in the business does to stay competitive – and so on.
Unfortunately, Greed has a few other sides. One of them is the fictional, core family drama, which seems to almost resemble a quasi-Greek tragedy (or Greek by way of Rome) of an arrogant man whose hubris will lead to his own downfall. This part of Greed didn’t work and mostly feels like needless set dressing to take the film into a more fictional realm. We spend time getting to know McCreadie’s family, business cohorts, and the people who surround him, but the time spent on these characters simply defangs and distracts from the film’s core message.
The other doesn’t-quite-work side of Greed is the broadest: a simple satire about the disconnected and brusque lifestyles of the 1%, and the way they treat the people beneath them. This is where Greed feels the most toothless and tonally confused, with its own condemnations never feeling as sharp or nasty as the business practices of McCreadie himself. Instead they take occasional stabs at comedy – only a few of which really work – about how out of it rich people are, and a few occasional stabs at drama – reminding us of the perils and tribulations of immigrants, which feels like it has no real place in the film at all.
Greed could’ve been great if it’d trimmed some of its broader ideas down, honed in on a clearer tone, and functioned as a ruthless takedown of capitalism and the billionaires who exploit it. But much like a tragic hero, it’s devoured by its own ambition.