Producers: David Boies, Kevin M. Brennan, Shannon Houchins, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller and Dylan Sellers Director: Potsy Ponciroli Screenplay: Mike Vukadinovich Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Himesh Patel, Lily James, Tim Blake Nelson, Uzo Aduba, Nina Arianda, Jim Gaffigan, José Yazpik, Joey Lauren Adams, Simon Rex, Traci Lords, Neva Joan Howell and Yingling Zhu Distributor: Lionsgate
Grade: C
Move the locale from the freezing Midwest of “Fargo,” to a faceless town on an island off the coast of North Carolina and you’ll have some idea of what Potsy Ponciroli’s “Greedy People” aspires to. But by piling bad choice on bad choice and corpse upon corpse, the would-be dark comedy grows ever more overburdened with compromised characters; along the way it also forgets to be funny.
The town where the action occurs is called Providence, perhaps to suggest that everything that happens is preordained. (It was actually shot by Eric Koretz, without much distinction, in Southport, North Carolina. The bland production design by Chad Keith and costumes by Brianna Quick certainly don’t make the place look attrative.) A new cop has been added to the force by Captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba)—nervous Will Shelley (Himesh Patel), who had some trouble at his last posting. He and his pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) are still moving into their house when he’s off for his first day on the job with his voluble, volatile partner Terry Brogan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who spends most of his day cadging free cups of coffee from the locals and enjoying afternoon quickies with Yu Yan (Yingling Zhu), while her husband’s away and Will waits in the patrol car by the curb.
That explains why Will’s alone when a call comes in, and he has to proceed solo to a house where a break-in is supposedly underway. There he encounters buxom housewife Virginia Chetlo (Traci Lords), who’s frightened by his intrusion and gets into a tussle with him. When they crash into a table, she’s fatally injured, breaking the first rule Brogan had given his new partner before going off for his tryst: “Don’t kill anybody.”
Unwilling to shoulder the consequences, the two cops decide to stage a burglary to blame Virginia’s death on a thief, but in the process find a stash of a million dollars and scheme to steal it for themselves. What they don’t know is that Virginia’s husband Wally (Tim Blake Nelson), the local shrimp entrepreneur, had left the cash as payment to a killer called The Columbian (José Yazpik) he’s hired to off his wife: he’s been having an affair with his secretary Debra (Nina Arianda) and wants to be free of his marital impediment. Now The Columbian, arriving after the fact and finding his money gone, is demanding his fee anyway, though Chetlo thinks he’s being double-billed.
That’s most of the folks in the chain of misfortune the complicated plot offers up for ridicule. Others include The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan), a second hired killer in the tiny burg, who boasts a mailbox with his nom de guerre on it where his clients drop off their payments; Keith Crawford (Simon Rex), a dim-bulb masseur who knows what the cops did; and his domineering mother (Neva Joan Howell).
There are some mildly amusing moments in “Greedy People”—Nelson makes a proper doofus, though he doesn’t come close to William H. Macy, whose turn in “Fargo” is the obvious inspiration for Wally, and the relationship between Keith and his know-it-all mother is good for a few chuckles. But otherwise the humor mostly fails to register—Aduba is nice enough (with poignant bookending scenes in her home), but Murphy is no Marge Gunderson, and even Gaffigan can’t do much with The (underwritten) Irishman.
As a result the movie becomes little more than a nasty catalogue of human folly and cascading death, played out by writer Mike Vukadinovich and director Ponciroli with a decidedly blunt satirical knife and haltingly edited by Jamie Kirkpatrick. But it’s difficult to care about characters being knocked off when they’ve barely been introduced. All the cast do adequate work trying to fill in the sketches the script provides them with (Patel and James work especially hard, though the writing does them no favors) but there’s only one standout—Gordon-Levitt, who brings real ferocity and menace to the unpredictable Brogan. Except in a few opening scenes, though, the performance is more frightening than amusing, and by the last reel it feels like he belongs in an unabashed film noir.
As to those responsible for “Greedy People,” they might take to heart something The Irishman says to a potential client: “You can know you’re not good, which is better than believing you are.”