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Greed review: Scattershot farce misses too many of its targets

It’s a thin line between love and hate — one that Steve Coogan exploits brilliantly in his greatest parodic creations. The worse Alan Partridge behaves, the more we love him. We are free to delight in his ever greater awfulness. That’s because Alan is an invention. He may have characteristics borrowed from actual arses but he’s not referable back to any one individual, not a portrait.

Greed is different and nothing like so good. Steve Coogan plays a character, “Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ McCreadie”, unambiguously based on Sir Philip Green, the fashion tycoon. The film is structured around the build up to McCreadie’s grotesquely ostentatious, Roman-themed 60th birthday party held on the island of Mykonos, complete with replica Colosseum and live lion, which he hopes will, with the help of celeb performers and guests, somehow restore his reputation, battered after a recent grilling by a parliamentary select committee about his dodgy business practices.

In 2016, Philip Green made just such an uncomfortable appearance before a select committee. For that matter, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a three-day toga-party on Cyprus, serenaded by Tom Jones and Rod Stewart. A mockumentary back history of Greedy’s entire life and career specifically follows that of Green, with only the names satirically changed.

So identification is not only unavoidable but a necessary frisson for the film. Yet the film’s director, Michael Winterbottom, maintains the movie is not an attack on an individual but rather a more general exposure of an unequal system, the cruel market that creates such monstrous disparity in wealth between the cavorting owners of high street fashion chains and the workers in poor and distant countries who make the clothes for a few dollars a day. This serious purpose is sapped by all the broad farce, though. Greedy is a joke but then again, not at all.

This is a movie that patently has not been sufficiently thought through: no decision has been taken as to whether it’s comedy or polemic, an explainer or a drama. A creaky plot attempts to bridge these different modes. Greedy has a young assistant, working as a party-planner — Amanda from Leicester (Dinita Gohil), whose own mother, it emerges, was, unknown to Greedy, a tragic victim of the Sri Lankan sweatshops he uses to manufacture clothes so cheaply. But this crass attempt to link these two worlds is so melodramatic in the end (follow the lion), that it ends up a throwaway.

There’s a subplot about Syrian refugees camping on the beach in Mykonos, played apparently by genuine refugees. Greedy wants them gone before the party, providing another illustration of his heartlessness — but, really, they have nothing to do with the subject of the film. Perhaps the film crew arriving for the shoot found them there and, being socially responsible themselves, opted to make them part of the production?

Too much of the film seems thus improvised, particularly the long, muddly scene of the party itself. Michael Winterbottom loves spontaneous party scenes driven by music (remember 24 Hour Party People?) and gives them a distinctively chaotic feel. But surely the more this seems like a genuine party, the less well it works for the film?

Coogan has fun with Greedy. Perma-tanned and sporting preposterously white sticky out teeth, he’s an inventive swearer and expert bully and cheat. There’s a running gag about his love of quotes from Gladiator — and when a hapless employee offers “those who are about to die salute you”, Greedy insists on him acting it out. “Go on then, die.” His first effort isn’t good enough. “Die again but better!” Greedy shouts. He insists on fuschia for one of his first boutiques: “You can’t get more interior than fuschia, that’s the colour of an actual twat.”

Funny business: Steve Coogan as Sir Richard 'Greedy' McCreadie
Funny business: Steve Coogan as Sir Richard 'Greedy' McCreadie

Shirley Henderson is Greedy’s ferocious Irish (not Jewish) mum, Isla Fisher his first wife who still holds much of his wealth in the tax haven of Monaco — a relationship that’s a little deeper and more intriguing than others in the film, yet goes nowhere. Asa Butterfield seems aimless as his Oedipally disaffected son, while Sarah Solemani makes the most of the minion tasked with bringing in the celebrity performers or, at a pinch, lookalikes, with lots of jokes about how much they all cost. Good sports Stephen Fry, James Blunt, Keira Knightley and Colin Firth turn in spoofy celebrity cameos.

David Mitchell tries to hold it together as a journalist hired by Greedy to write his biography, an appalled but compromised witness, as it were a transplanted Mark Corrigan, our stand in as he tours the sweatshops and has Greedy’s methods explained to him by a cynical financial journalist.

The film closes, Big Short style, with some stats on cards about comparative incomes, the amount of money sheltered in tax havens, the proportion of billionaires that are men, etc, crowned by a pious quote from E.M. Forster, “only connect”. It seems that the co-producer Sony stopped Winterbottom naming specific fashion moguls and compromised celebs, as he originally intended. But it’s hard to feel more pointed accusations would have made much difference, this scattershot film itself having already so missed its targets. Winterbottom’s spontaneity has worked so much better elsewhere. The Trip to Greece, on Sky from March 3, looks promising.