Greedy People is a callback to the crime thrillers popular in the mid-nineties, however, this film does not reach the heights of Pulp Fiction or Out of Sight. Instead, it is reminiscent of the knockoffs of those films. Do you remember 2 Days in the Valley or Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead? Unless you spent all your free time in a video store, probably not, but Greedy People continues in that tradition of combining all the genre staples, minus the special sauce that made them great entertainments.
There are a lot of characters in Greedy People—an ensemble full of reliable aging stars and character actors—and yet the premise could not be simpler: there is a bag of cash, and everyone wants it. We first learn of this bag through Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Will (Himesh Patel), two police officers in a picturesque South Carolina seaside town. Terry is foul-mouthed and lazy, while Will is the nervous new guy. After a major misunderstanding during a house call, Will accidentally kills a middle-aged woman named Virginia (Traci Lords) and uncovers the money. Thinking fast, he and Terry decide to keep it, staging the crime scene to look like a traditional break-in. Their plan falls apart, of course, because they don’t know the money’s true purpose: it was payoff for a hitman hired by Virginia’s husband, Wallace (Tim Blake Nelson), to kill her.
An unscrupulous husband who thinks nothing of his wife? Bumbling cops? Yeah, this sounds like an early draft of Fargo, except without the specificity that the Coen brothers brought to that film. Screenwriter Michael Vukadinovich and director Potsy Ponciroli expand their scope with more characters—including Virginia’s masseuse (Simon Rex) and Will’s wife (Lily James)—seemingly without realizing that each additional character makes the twists all the more convoluted. Greedy People tries to make sense of it all through title cards that introduce the various factions—a kind of unnecessary flourish that attempts gravitas the film never quite earns. Yes, the plot descends into violence with few characters surviving all the misunderstandings, yet these people rarely act according to their natures, only doing what the plot requires of them, which gives all the action a mechanical quality that diminishes any sense of surprise or suspense.
Some actors and moments elevate the material. Gordon-Levitt clearly has fun playing against type as an uncouth anti-hero, accomplishing something tricky by showing Terry is much smarter than he sounds. Rex is a hoot as the masseuse, the kind of male bimbo who recognizes a bad situation but cannot work his way out of it. But so many actors in the ensemble, including Lily James and Jim Gaffigan as a low-rent assassin, sleepwalk through an increasingly dangerous situation. The film’s formal qualities do not exactly elevate the material, keeping a demure arm’s length from the action and shooting the warm South Carolina sunlight so that it avoids menace almost deliberately. There have been many similar crime movies set in the south— Wild Things and Night Moves immediately come to mind—and Greedy People does not continue in that tradition because it hardly uses its location as an asset.
At the end of Fargo, Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson remarks, “There’s more to life than a little money, you know? Don’t you know that? And here you are, and it’s a beautiful day.” It is a brilliant little speech, a sign that Marge was unfazed by the ridiculous scheme she uncovered. In Greedy People, a film where everyone—including the filmmakers—needs someone like Marge on their shoulder, her speech can feel like a constant refrain. Ponciroli and Vukadinovich halfheartedly attempt to shoehorn this type of character into the film with, you guessed it, a mild-mannered police chief named Murphy (Uzo Aduba), and yet she stands too outside the action for her clarity to matter. At least this film has the welcome, unintended effect of making us realize that the classics of the genre will continue to stand the test of time as more filmmakers fail to replicate their singular charms.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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