Greed: Patchy Satire Mines Rocky Turf Between Fast Fashion and Vast Wealth

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

Greed arrives at a propitious time as the subject of fast fashion — like fast food, clothing that is cheap and disposable but with troubling, far-reaching hidden costs — moves into the mainstream as never before.

Several recent books (notably, Dana Thomas’ excellent Fashionopolis: The Price Of Fast Fashion And The Future Of Clothes) and films (Rubaiyat Hossain's Made in Bangladesh which, like Greed, played TIFF 2019) have thoughtfully explored the insidious impact one-season-wear clothing has on the people who make it and on the environment. In lockstep with this is a massive global movement — led by Marie Kondo but pitched by countless others — to really think about and ultimately downsize on just such superfluous stuff.

So enters Greed, potentially the most conspicuous statement on the subject, and yet the most muddled. The film, basically a screed posing as a satire, reunites director/writer Michael Winterbottom with actor Steve Coogan, also a propitious event (well, sometimes… looking at you, The Trip to Spain).

At the centre of the story is Coogan’s Sir Richard McCreadie, a.k.a. “Greedy” McCreadie, a self-made British retail tycoon with a flare for taking publicly traded clothing companies private (and making a huge profit for himself in the process) and for exploiting workers in developing nations to keep his throwaway rags cheap in the style of H&M.

McCreadie is in Mykonos on the eve of his 60th birthday, where he is planning a Bacchanalian recreation of ancient Rome to fête his fine self… and maybe to enhance his increasingly pulverized reputation. But the headaches quickly mount.

Work on a built-from-scratch Gladiatorial amphitheatre is running woefully behind. The live lion meant to thrill seems sluggish. And desperate Syrian refugees have arrived at the public beach bordering McCreadie’s villa. Bad press back home has resulted in celebrity guests dropping out of the party amid troubling optics. Oh, the humanity.

Flashbacks in service to an official biographer (David Mitchell) riding sidecar and assembling McCreadie’s life story take us through McCreadie’s rise in the retail ranks as first his puckish mother and then his equally ambitious wife (wonderfully, campily played by Shirley Henderson and Isla Fisher, respectively) cheer him on. Simultaneously, a public inquiry into McCreadie’s dubious business practices lays bare his bottomless avarice.

There is a lot of nastiness to ingest in Greed; the film’s cynicism is unyielding and buttressed by savage dialogue, extended glimpses of workers toiling making McCreadie’s clothes (then suffering the indignity of being filmed wishing him a Happy Birthday for playback during his party), flagrant sums being tossed around and, well, those pesky refugees.

Throughout, it’s evident the filmmakers are striving for caustic and/or morbid humour but the jokes rarely land, and are invariably backdropped by stuff that really, seriously, isn’t funny.

Another part of the problem is that, until the closing credits, Greed could be a placeholder for any number of industries that rape the earth and its underclass with impunity, from diamond mining to slaughterhouse work.

That wouldn’t really matter so much if Winterbottom didn’t make it clear, through a series of stark, jarring, and apparently controversial statistics flashed at the film’s end that fast fashion is the devil here. Yet McCreadie could be anyone; inequality of wealth plays much larger throughout the film’s running time than the fact that 80 percent of garment workers are women, many earning less than $3 a day in factories that are often literal death traps.

Also, Syrians don’t make cheap jeans, but they factor rather prominently here as an example of crushing wealth disparity and disquieting global politics. Their presence is wholly gratuitous.

The nihilistic and relentlessly despicable McCreadie presents another obstacle to Greed’s ultimate impact. Winterbottom unearths no humanity from his lead character, save a flash of lust for his ex-wife whom he nevertheless dumped for a younger, faster version. His children stir nothing meaningful within him, and even his vast wealth seems not to bring much joy though those celebrity birthday greetings (buoyed by some choice cameos) tickle his vanity. We care about this guy… why?

Despite Greed’s patchy messaging, there is joy in witnessing comeuppance. Winterbottom is very generous in this regard. And Coogan revels in his character’s duplicitous, materialistic, scheming ways with a performance that is, for better or worse, truly unforgettable.

It means well, but Greed fails to locate the heart of the fast-fashion calamity, instead spotlighting the grotesqueness of the one percent at the expense of everyone else.

Greed. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Starring Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, David Mitchell, Shirley Henderson and Asa Butterfield. Opens wide March 6.