Although Erich von Stroheim’s mauled 1924 masterpiece “Greed” is nearly 100 years old, it is sufficiently monumental that adopting its title can still seem like an attempted flex.
In the case of Michael Winterbottom’s new movie, a satire starring a frequent collaborator, Steve Coogan, it’s less an allusion than a direct, blatant and bitter statement of theme.
Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a coarse but not wholly dumb rag-trade millionaire micromanaging his own 60th birthday celebration. In this framework Winterbottom, who wrote the script with Sean Gray providing “additional material,” constructs a time-traveling, format-shifting biopic with a from-humble-beginnings hook. Some of the eat-the-rich barbs here are about a decade stale. If you think you’ve heard McCreadie’s “I don’t need drugs, I am drugs” boast, you have — from Salvador Dalí. But Coogan brings his usual comic reliability to his characterization, as does Isla Fisher as the rich man’s predictably estranged wife, and they wring laughs from the material.
Like “Casino,” “The Big Short” and “The Laundromat,” this movie has a strong pedagogic component, to lay bare the most rank excesses of contemporary capitalism. Here, as it happens, “Greed” is at its strongest.
The movie effectively demonstrates that the open markets pushed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were not constructed with the expectation, or even the hope, that a rapacious actor in the McCreadie mode would behave decently within them. “Greed” also features cogent explanations of debt restructuring: the way banks throw dumpsters full of cash to rich “entrepreneurs” while never offering so much as a rope ladder of credit to the poor who work for these characters. The final sequence detailing income inequality and sweatshop exploitation in the fashion industry is a powerful kick in the teeth.
Greed
Rated R; these rich people are all kinds of vulgar. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
