There could be any number of Coen Brothers moments that come to mind watching Greedy People, a film directed by Potsy Ponciroli, but by the end the one that feels most appropriate is the ending of Burn After Reading where after a resolution has been carefully averted and all parties of the elaborate plot have been neutralized in some way or another, an impartial FBI director played by J.K. Simmons just mulls over how little he can make sense of the whole affair. An inexplicable non-closure from one of the more contentious films in their oeuvre, the spirit of it seems very much alive in Greedy People, which ultimately closes out on a similar attitude of ‘well, what was the point of all that?’.
Burn After Reading only barely gets away with it, and that's from the Coens themselves with their rich grasp of character and whip-smart writing. What chance does a stock imitation have?
Set in an undisclosed southern island town called Providence and centred on the vicinity of its police force, the movie depicts the fallout of an accidental death resulting from a botched emergency response from newcomer rookie officer Will Shelley (Himesh Patel). But the discovery at the scene of a mass stockpile of cash prompts him and his corrupt partner Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to make off with the money and disguise the incident as a murder that they themselves are soon made to investigate. Various dangerous confidences and misunderstandings around the death though soon involve several more parties, including Will's pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) -just about everybody ultimately being revealed to be, as the title implies, a greedy person.
I'll try not to evoke the Coens so frequently, but this is one of the more shameless attempts I've seen to mimic their style of narrative, albeit certainly without the same level of quality dialogue or filmmaking. But so many hallmarks of their crime comedy films are featured here. A rural inconspicuous setting and a tone that fluctuates between absurd comedy and serious drama, an eclectic cast of double-crossing characters including a pregnant woman, Tim Blake Nelson, and a handful of incompetent criminals, a vague thesis around a spiritual theme with some ‘clever’ component as in this case being tied to the name of the town, the aforementioned refusal of a standard resolution, and even arguably the magical negro. Even Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan Coen’s imitation of a Coen Brothers film doesn’t stick to the playbook this much. But as I stated there, the issue of every one of these movies is they can’t find their own version of that distinct voice to make it work.
This movie’s writer, Michael Vukadinovich, certainly tries. His script aims for sharp wit but never hits it in either the dialogue or the situational storytelling. The inciting incident is played very awkwardly -with the woman Virginia (Traci Lords) far too quick to attack Will physically and that accident that kills her just a little too implausible. There are good jokes scattered throughout the movie -particularly from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the only especially good performance as he relishes the chance to play someone so scummy when you get right down to it; but at every turn the humour feels obligatory, and not like it naturally arises from the situation or the writer’s inspiration. And it feels notably unoriginal. Even a bit that could be inspired, like the hitman who lives with his mother trying to get payment from the deceased’s husband -who’d hired him to kill his wife- even though the job was done without him, doesn’t have the spark of ingenuity that you’d think it demands.
The mood that Ponciroli sets alongside this humour is fairly intense -I think in reference to Fargo. A lot of focus in the second act is put on Paige, whom Will confides with on the incident though changing the narrative to put the blame on Terry, and her increasing suspicions and fears about Terry -who in fairness demonstrates a certain sociopathic streak. But in some sections this tone comes to drown out the levity, especially as characters start dying. And the movie doesn’t start from that place of overhanging bleakness that was Fargo’s great strength, so it feels more jarring for the film to turn thriller. Nobody seems quite capable of striking the appropriate balance either -retaining character through these shifts in tone. And just in general the leading performances aren’t made of much. There’s a charm in the reunion of Patel and James, who were quite adorable love interests in Yesterday, but they don’t have the same chemistry here as they struggle with these less definable parts, Patel especially.
One of the themes the movie would like to stress is how everybody is self-interested and greedy when it gets right down to it. Even if the death itself was an accident, Will schemes to throw Terry under the bus, Paige has machinations of her own even in light of harrowing circumstances for her family, and Terry is just a loose canon. These dimensions make the characters more cynical, but no more interesting or identifiable -and so the movie starts to feel like a hollow exercise of this idea more than anything. The only decent character appears to be the police chief played by Uzo Aduba -but far from being a Marge Gunderson, she’s just blandly professional -a bookending point-of-view character ever so much a stereotype to lend the proceedings some air of ill-earned gravitas.
Ponciroli’s direction is measured and static and mostly banal, very rarely is the setting taken advantage of either visually or thematically -you get the sense it was chosen just for the accents, and it makes sense then why it is specifically ambiguous. The film’s ambiguity more generally though doesn’t stand up -the circumstances of its ending and the enigma of where the money came from and what happens to it, meant to be a pseudo-nihilistic statement on that theme of greed, goes down like a lead balloon. It is contrived and empty, even more so in light of its eager harshness, and not in the least bit some profound thesis on human nature. It just leaves you realizing nothing in the movie actually mattered.
A two hour waste of time that felt like three, Greedy People is a dulling experience only occasionally broken up by a spark of life. A dying battery of a Coen Brothers knock-off that has barely the enthusiasm of even their least engaging efforts. Burn after watching indeed.
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