All the markers of a classic Coen Brothers’ crime comedy are there in Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People — the third film released this year that promises but never quite manages to recreate the gut-busting horrors and pleasures of Ethan and Joel Coen’s 1996 film Fargo. (Shane Atkinson’s LaRoy, Texas is funny and, occasionally, emotionally poignant but never shocking; Francis Galluppi’s leaner and meaner The Last Stop In Yuma County forgoes comedy for explosions of shock and occasional schlock). The film is set in Providence County, the seaport capital of Rhode Island, where the price of people’s lives is about the same as that of the leftover shrimp cocktails that Wallace Chetlo (Coens’ regular Tim Blake Nelson), the “seafood supplier of the island,” sells to his customers. Everyone in town pretends it’s fine, of course, because murder and intolerable cruelty are the norm here, a byproduct of the opportunism and greed that plagues everyone — be it gangsters, policemen, masseurs, businessmen, or pregnant women. Except, maybe, Inspector Murphy (Uzo Aduba) — the Marge Gunderson of Greedy People — who, grief-stricken by the loss of her adopted child, is considerably less caricaturish and more considerate than all of the film’s other characters.
Indeed, in Murphy we find the tricky tonal balance — between overplotted, farcical character drama and starkly sincere emotion — that Ponciroli and writer Michael Vukadinovich consistently want to strike but rarely manage to. It’s not that they’re wildly off-the-mark: Greedy People, out of the three Coen-riffs this year, is perhaps most successful at trying to find a middle ground between Joel’s cosmic nihilism and Ethan’s wildly ill-disciplined zaniness. But it still never quite works because Vukadinovich’s writing, while plot-wise resembling the Coens’ work too much, is almost entirely devoid of the idiosyncratic eccentricity with which the brothers imbue their memorable characters. So instead, you get all the archetypes: the bumbling and not-so-buddy cops — one potty-mouthed and overly talkative (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the other practically speechless (Himesh Patel) — who discover the stash of money that throws their moralities out the window; the masseuse-cum-toyboy (Simon Rex, now the go-to-person for these roles after Sean Baker’s Red Rocket) controlled by his over-domineering mother and planning on blackmailing the cops over the money; the Anton Chigurh-like hitman (José María Yazpik) whose presence looms large over everything and everyone. But you never really get them: even though the film introduces all of these “greedy people” one by one, devoting a chapter heading to each, hardly any of them leaves an impression. Gordon-Levitt comes the closest because his character embodies the wild tonal swings the film consistently takes; essentially, he’s supposed to go from broad, Knives Out-style loud comedy to elemental, Blood Simple-esque stylized menace. But his effort shows, especially in the film’s overtly comedic sections. By contrast, Patel’s (and most everyone else’s) remains almost non-existent — and not in a way that savvily plays off Levitt’s expressivity, but rather to the point of near indifference.
The two characters (and performances) that are least involved in the tonal juggling, then, make the most impression. Both Inspector Murphy and Paige (Lily James), the quiet officer’s pregnant wife, form the film’s emotional core: they’re former or to-be mothers, thrust into this convoluted scheme of murder for money by the men around them, “ready to kill” to protect their family. The film treats both these characters utterly seriously, as do the actors, pushing the climactic act of Greedy People away from the ineffective blend of crime comedy and toward the unrelenting bleakness of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men (2007). It’s most definitely starker and nastier in this final stretch, but then, so too is The Last Stop at Yuma Country, and more consistently. It seems 2024 is a tough year to be a Coens’ knockoff, though not as tough as it is to be a Coen film, so silver linings.
DIRECTOR: Potsy Poncirolli; CAST: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lily James, Tim Blake Nelson, Joey Lauren Adams; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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