“Coen-esque” is a term usually thrown at any quirky crime epic that sees everyday people discover how ruthless they can be when a sizable chunk of change suddenly falls into their lap. Movies such as Blood Simple and Fargo have helped the Coen Brothers become shorthand for any sort of darkly humorous stories that act as a microscope to the true morality behind the American dream and anyone who dares venture into this area have some pretty big shoes to fill.
Aiming to do just that is Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People, a typically twisted tale that sees yet another struggling couple suddenly get a shot at easy street by horribly dishonest – yet initially accidental – means that usually also suck in an array of random supporting characters who muddy the waters to the point of chaos.
But can this latest attempt to reverse engineer one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema manage to steal the limelight?
Will Shelly is starting his first shift as an officer of the law in the Rhode Island city of Providence and is teamed up with washed-up officer, Terry Brogan, who has been tasked to steer him through his first day. However, Terry is hardly what you’d describe as a top cop. When he’s not screaming at jaywalkers in the street and procurring endless cups of coffee, he’s practising Mandarin in order to facilitate an affair he’s having – during hours, of course – with a married Chinese woman. But seeing as Will has a child on the way that’s barely four weeks away from being born, he lets it all slide, even when some of the unhelpful professional advice he’s getting is “don’t kill anybody” – yeah, no shit Terry.
However, while Terry is getting Will to cover for him while he sews his Mandarin speaking oats, a call comes in that Will thinks is a burglary in progress and as he can’t seem to get his partners attention, he races off to the address to respond. However, when he gets there he finds no robbery in progress; but he does find incensed housewife Virginia Chetlo who is so pissed that this random, agitated, police officer has barged into her house and accidently discharged a bullet mere inches from her head, she attacks Will and attempts to choke him out.
However, during the scuffle Virginia manages to contract a rather unfortunate case of accidental death and you realise that maybe Will should’ve heeded Terry’s advice of not killing anyone a little bit closer – but when Terry arrives to survey the carnage, the two officers just so happen to find a basket full of one million dollars in cash just sitting in the living room.
Before you know it, the two cops have decided to take the money, ransack the place and make it look like a robbery gone wrong, but the very second they decide to cross that line, they trigger a string of events that reveal that a lot of the people in Virginia’s orbit weren’t exactly law abiding citizens either. With Will’s wife, Paige, Virginia’s husband, a kindly police chief and a couple of competing hitmen thrown in for good measure, this clutch of greedy people are about to become dangerous.
To beat the Coens at their own game is as nigh on impossible as trying to top Tarantino with talky pop culture references or one-up Paul Verhoven with thrillingly vicious sci-fi satire, but every now and then someone manages to land a movie in the same ballpark. Sam Raimi managed it with the frostily harsh A Simple Plan and only recently, Francis Galluppi’s deviously tense The Last Stop In Yuma County also nailed that mixture of sweaty unpredictability and kooky ensembles, but while Greedy People certainly has the cast to back it up, it doesn’t quite have the necessary tauntness to carry it off fully. Coming off crusty western Old Henry, director Ponciroli selects a similarly deliberate pace to tackle this succession of accidental deaths and moral conundrums, but the weirdest thing about it as it starts almost like a Seth Rogen comedy as Himesh Patel’s bemused cop is taken under the wing of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s shitheel wash out. You can tell that Levitt is having the time of his life barking insults and shitty advice from beneath his Lemmy from Motorhead beard as he gets into screechy, traffic disputes with ex-girlfriends and concocts flimsy plots to try and bag the money after the freak accident kicks off the plot. However, compared to his co-star, Patel’s Will seems to be almost a non-character as he isn’t given much to do other than stare on with shell-shocked eyes while other actors get to grandstand and this slight mismatch of performances gives Greedy People the feel of patchwork quilt of past Coen Brothers movies that mixes characters from random films. You could argue that despite the awful accident that claims the life of a near unrecognisable Traci Lords, Will is a wide-eyed, weak willed, but easily corruptible innocent that’s possibly in the same boat as the lion’s share of Coen schmucks.
However, Levitt’s Terry seems to have walked directly out of Raising Arizona while Lily James’ scheming wife feels more like Blood Simple and Uzo Aduba’s mourning police chief has the gentle, capable air of a Marge Gunderson from Fargo as she quietly assesses the mounting carnage with a sensible eye. Other, ever more exaggerated, side characters much like Simon Rex’s slimy masseuse and Tim Blake Nelson’s shifty shrimp magnate also strongly resemble the type of dark buffoonery that the Brothers Coen have specialised in for decades.
As a result, Greedy People tends to feel less like a trend setting original and more like a capable cover by a band who haven’t yet found their own identity. All the right and familiar notes are there and they’re played with some style, but its seeming attempt to be a love letter to other filmmakers means that it can’t quite get its story over the top the way that some of its influences could. Going from eccentric a Coloumbian hitman that absent mindely puppeteers the mouth of a corpse while he mulls over his situation to the far more straight drama of Will and Paige’s situation proves to be a bit too uneven a jump for the director to handle.
However, there’s still a lot to admire here for those searching for quirky crime oddities and a couple of legitimately shocking plot turns manage to keep the film moving at a good speed, but more demanding viewers of eccentric comedy thrillers may feel a fair bit of deja vu as misinformation and paranoia inevitably has these players all at each other’s throats despite no one knowing the true story.
Some strong, standout performances and a surprisingly dark denouement keeps things from feeling too familiar, but Greedy People still gorges a little too much on it’s influences to truly stand alone.
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