Greed (2020) - Movie Review

The latest collaboration from the winning team of writer/director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan, Greed is an obvious if fitting title for a film all about the inner workings of the greedy and the ruthless in the world of business. Specifically, the world of high fashion, where Coogan’s Sir Richard McCreadie has made an infamous name for himself. And shortly after being brought up on official hearings for his shady business practices, he sets off for Mykonos to host a perversely-lavish 60^th birthday party.

As a satire of the obscenely wealthy, the main tool in this production’s arsenal is a rather familiar dichotomy: Immense wealth in the hands of those with zero taste. It is genuinely impressive, and gratifying, to see this film manage to wring so much material out of one of the more common observations of the conspicuous consumer, and it results in a lot of dark chuckles.

Coogan sells this impossibly tasteless bozo with fitting aplomb, and in a proper surprise, Isla Fisher as his ex-wife/company CEO didn’t make me want to pull my hair out just from hearing her talk. When she remarks that she’s not a gynecologist, but she knows a cunt when she sees one, any snarky quip I could make about the hypocrisy of her saying that gets washed away in just how well she delivers that line.

Incredibly vulgar quipping is all over the place in Winterbottom’s scripting, a fitting match for a story all about a very vulgar collection of people, Sir Richard in particular. The way the film outlines how he got to the top of the high street, through what can charitably be called a more elaborate version of sleight-of-hand (that just happens to involve Wolf Of Wall Street-level shadiness), gives a quite vivid portrait of someone who, as a cameo from Stephen Fry aptly puts it, is a self-made billionaire who worships his creator.

While told in non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth from Richard’s come-up (if such underhanded behaviour can even be considered a come-up) to his demand that the interior of one of his shops be fuchsia (since it’s the colour of a twat, and you can’t get any more interior that that), the main crux of the narrative is his birthday party, an insanely expensive Gladiator-themed affair that turns into an almost Watch The Throne display of hubris in choosing a highly inopportune time to flash his wealth. Namely, on a beach where a group of Syrian refugees are “ruining his view”.

The film operates primarily through depicting these harsh dualities. Opulent wealth set against the tragedy that funds it. Ostensible financial genius against barely-legal undercurrents. Staged reality TV drama against the genuine article. Obsession with aesthetics against a lack of understanding of the context behind said aesthetics. And in the perpetual tug-of-war at the heart of the film, setting Sir Richard up for not so much a fall as much as a delicious re-interpretation of ‘eat the rich’, the pitch-black comedy gives way to bona fide tragedy. And not for anyone of the well-off either, but for the people stuck in this cycle of adding to the prestige and legend of outright bastards like McCreadie (himself loosely based on real-life businessman and fellow exploiter of taxes and sweatshops Philip Green).

It’s a quite scathing piece of 1% satire, and it might have turned out utterly depressing or even tone-deaf in its implications (and its use of real-world statistics in the epilogue) if it weren’t for how in-tune its comedic timing is. It’s a well-cast and incredibly effective comedy that works nicely as a vehicle for some pretty righteous flogging of the super-rich.