Steve Coogan revels in Greed’s journey of excess
Steve Coogan attacks with gusto the role of a self-made billionaire in Michael Winterbottom’s Greed.
In Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Greece, the fourth instalment of The Trip franchise (which aired earlier this year), Steve Coogan again plays a heightened version of himself on an odyssey of eating, drinking and failed self-discovery with his familiar travelling companion, Rob Brydon.
For director Winterbottom and star Coogan the production marked the second shoot in paradise in the space of less than two years — in Greed, shot in Greece a year earlier, Coogan’s character embarks on a journey of excess on a far more bloated scale.
Coogan attacks with gusto the role of a self-made billionaire determined to throw himself the biggest Roman-themed party Mykonos has seen. Sporting an orange tan and blinding white teeth, Coogan plays an embattled fashion tycoon, Sir Richard McCreadie, who is loosely based on British retail entrepreneur and Topshop founder Sir Philip Green. McCreadie is throwing a lavish 60th birthday party to try to restore a diminished reputation in the only way he knows how: by spending big. It’s to be a Gladiator-inspired, celebrity-studded event, where everyone will be wearing togas, a colosseum is being hastily constructed, and there’s a real lion on show. It’s all in the name of image repair, after his business practices came under harsh scrutiny at a parliamentary select committee hearing that investigated the collapse of one of his biggest companies.
At the same time, a journalist, Nick, played by David Mitchell, has been following him around, not to subject him to harsher scrutiny but to work on an authorised biography. The narrative device allows Winterbottom to show us, in flashbacks, how McCreadie got to where he is: from hustling a 50-pence piece from a fellow student in a magic trick to within-the-law acts of exploitation business after business and company after company in the fast fashion trade.
Isla Fisher plays McCreadie’s ex-wife, Samantha, whose appetite for consumption and exploitation more than matches his. She’s a shrewder operator than McCreadie and Fisher brings a light, amused touch to the character’s blithe assumption of every luxury, perk and bonus that his business can offer her.
Greed is broad satire, based closely on real events, circumstances and people, and it has met with a mixed reception from reviewers: for some, it lacks subtlety, to say the least.
This is the kind of role that Coogan is particularly suited to. He has always been able to combine the appalling and the appealing, to be simultaneously shameless and self-aware — it’s a trait on display, memorably, in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, in which Alfred Molina plays an eager admirer proposing a collaboration with Coogan, who treats him with weary condescension — right up to the moment when he realises Molina might have something he wants. And in one of the best Winterbottom-Coogan collaborations, 24 Hour Party People — a portrait of the life of Manchester’s Factory Records and the people and bands associated with it — he’s effortlessly brazen, rife with contradictions, as Tony Wilson, broadcaster, hustler, superfan and founder of the company.
Winterbottom says he sees Green as “a very colourful character and hands-on, and it seemed as if we could use him as a role model for Steve’s character”, but adds: “I hope the film is an attack not on an individual but on a system. It’s about the way in which the market works, the system works, and how we all go along with it.
“Fashion is great for something like this because in all globalised industries there are similar stories. But fashion is everywhere: there are tens of millions of women making these clothes round the world and there’s high street fashion everywhere in every small town you go to.” Winterbottom has made documentaries as well as features, and he could have tackled the subject either way, he says. “Both are valid. And I’ve done documentaries (in this area), I did a thing with Russell Brand about inequality (The Emperor’s New Clothes, in 2015).”
But there are various advantages to making a feature; focusing on a character such as McCreadie can allow the filmmaker to cover a lot of ground. His career, says Winterbottom, “spans the beginning of Thatcherism, the whole free market model, the beginning of globalisation, and by using a character like that you can get access and show how the world works. With the business deals, and the way it works with tax and so on, all that is not exaggerated, so we’re not in the position of making anyone look any worse. Obviously it’s fictional, but we followed it very closely.”
And a fictional work can entertain as well as inform. “McCreadie is an enjoyable character, his world’s an enjoyable world and the contradictions are enjoyable.” It’s hardly a favourable portrait — he’s a bully and an exploiter in every conceivable aspect of his life — yet he can sometimes come across, Winterbottom says, as “a loveable rogue”.
A fictional portrait also allows Winterbottom to bring worlds together that otherwise would be separate. The figure of Amanda (Dinita Gohil) at first seems simply to be part of the McCreadie entourage, but there’s more to her than that. She had worked in one of McCreadie’s shops before becoming part of his PR team. And, it turns out, she has family connections in Sri Lanka to the businesses he exploits, connections that play a part in the final twist of the narrative.
Then there’s the role of the chronicler, the outside observer. Mitchell (Peep Show) is on familiar ground, portraying Nick as a diffident figure who does not pretend to feel at home in the worlds of business or fashion, and does not even seem able to operate a video camera. He seems more comfortable quoting Shelley or correcting people about Aristotle, and he is particularly naive on financial matters. He seeks out a finance journalist in an attempt to understand McCreadie’s business model, a scene that also serves to explain to the audience just how rapacious the process is.
A hired gun, while doing interviews with McCreadie’s former colleagues for the book he is also recording video greetings from them to be broadcast at the party. Despite this, Winterbottom says we should identify with Nick as “a surrogate for the audience and for the director” and as someone trying to make sense of it all. “We are all compromised, in a way.” When it comes to being a consumer with a conscience, he says, “it’s quite hard to know which brands to choose because it’s not like one is good and one is bad, because this is the way the whole system is organised, it’s hard to be outside it.”
Winterbottom has always been interested in the way the media covers events and the way individual journalists function. In The Face of an Angel (2014), he tackled the story of the murder conviction in Italy of Amanda Knox that had been the topic of frenzied coverage worldwide. Winterbottom’s fictionalised version of the story focused on the victim. While the intense media coverage drew him to the story, he said at the time, he did not condemn it outright. “I wanted to explore why we are interested in those sorts of stories and the difficulties of how you write about them. Journalists have to write for the market and we collectively are that market. The responsibility for how we treat stories like that is everyone’s.”
In the world of fast fashion — certainly as it operated pre-COVID — Winterbottom is also intrigued by the role of celebrities in elevating brands and individuals. Celebrities can be paid to endorse fashion businesses and labels, and they can function as supporters of someone’s personal brand.
In Greed, McCreadie is relying on celebrities to turn up at his birthday party to vindicate his sense of self. Some will be paid to entertain — he’s hoping for Elton John but gradually begins to modify his expectations — and some will be paid to turn up (there’s a gag about Keith Richards running late for the event, and a threat to withhold payment).
Winterbottom confesses to being puzzled by the real-life willingness of household names to play at private parties, as they did for the likes of Green. “It’s surprising that superstars who have so much more money are so willing to be the wedding band or the birthday party band (at someone’s event)”.
As McCreadie’s star wanes, there are last-minute cancellations galore, the party organisers resort to desperate measures. Winterbottom persuaded the likes of James Blunt, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth and Keira Knightley to play themselves as figures in the McCreadie orbit.
Greed ends with a famous quote from EM Forster, “Only connect”. This is, Winterbottom hastens to say, “not to make your mind wander off to Howards End. Everyone knows there is a fundamental connection between women making £3 a day working in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Myanmar, and billionaires sitting on yachts in Monaco and not paying their taxes
“And so there’s this incredibly huge gap, and we’re all party to it.”
It is often assumed, he says, “that it’s the factory owners in these countries who are the problem, that they’re exploiting their workers. But the owner and managers we talked to in Sri Lanka who are making clothes for big global Western brands say that there’s a constant pressure from the big international brands to drive prices down; they’re constantly being told if you can’t do it for a dollar we’ll find someone else who can do it cheaper. It’s a race to the bottom the whole time.”
Greed is available on DVD and digital.
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