Review by Zach Dennis
A lot of people seem to be attempting to find a way to talk about excess.
On television, you have Succession and Billions; in the movies, you can look to recent films such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Nocturama, which both examine the need to consume. But those can turn serious, and in his latest, Michael Winterbottom attempts to look at conspicuous consumption and the one percent through his own satirical lens.
Greed doesn’t leave any room for interpretation. Starring frequent collaborator Steve Coogan as Sir Richard McCreadie (or, as most call him, McGreedy), the story follows the setting up off his birthday party in Greece while also bouncing back and forth throughout his life because of the inclusion of his biographer (David Mitchell) on the trip.
McCreadie is a fashion store mogul, with Winterbottom and Coogan framing him in the same mold as H&M but with the bite of Logan Roy.
The first half of the film plays on Coogan’s strengths: he gets to him and haw, similar to his elevated self in Winterbottom’s The Trip films but without the melancholy and more of a distance. Along for the ride is his ex-wife (Isla Fisher) who has helped to filter his money into various properties, including a yacht in Monaco.
Between the flash-backs as well as the struggle to implement McCreadie’s birthday plans in Greece — he has requested a replica of the gladiator pit from the movie Gladiator where he and his guests will watch someone fight a lion in full ancient garb —the film also includes a subplot between one of McCreadie’s staff members, Amanda (Dinita Gohil), who is helping to work on the birthday party but also is torn between the way they have dealt with a group of refugees who are on a nearby beach to the behest of McCreadie.
The situation calls back Amanda’s own past in Sri Lanka, where her family worked in the same factories that McCreadie used to funnel out his clothing at a much cheaper rate than working through the U.K.
At this point, Greed pivots to speaking on international labor and how it has allowed the most powerful rich to exploit that labor in order to make more products for less, but it never seems to have a real punch. As the party naturally goes a bit awry, the power in the family shifts from McCreadie to his initially apathetic son (Asa Butterfield), who sees it as an opportunity to get back at his family but also sees the rewards possible with that amount of power.
Greed never seems entirely misguided, but feels less striking for an age when more eyes are on the degrees of wealth of the top one percent than ever before. As it concludes, it plays a number of stats on international labor, which seems strange for a plot that was only given much due late in the film and, even then, never felt like it was fully developed to begin with.
The satire between McCreadie and his family never really had much to say about the laborers or the refugees who were on the beach. In all, it seems like the film wanted to find its heart by the end, but really forgot to establish it because the narrative came from a place of wanting to spit in the face of the rich rather than draw attention to the disenfranchised.
It isn’t a complete misstep for Winterbottom and Coogan, as the actor does give a lively and wonderful comedic performance, but it is a tame entry into the recent pop culture annals on monetary consumption.