Greedy People 2024

Greedy-People-2024
Greedy People 2024

In his feature film Old Henry, Potsy Ponciroli splattered an outrageous amount of blood whilst shooting around the porch of a frontier homestead. Punished by injustice, after slaying a senseless crime a century later Fargo police chief Marge Gunderson put it this way And for what? For a little bit of money. For his second feature film Greedy People, Ponciroli reunites with his coen brothers collaborator Tim Blake Nelson but replaces the savage wilderness with modern day northeast USA, this time setting his cash in flick in the southern town of Providence.

Now, Ponciroli drives a different pen. This time, he is not the sole writer however it seems that this film has the same coen-esque influences which screams progression throughout the whole film as compared to this author’s last film Old Henry. In other words, this film screams duality, unlike its predecessor. It precedes Old Henry’s legacy but instead of blending with the screams, it opts for a more brazen image with daring accents. The film too features a powerful female lead in a deceptively laconic role, and as with other elements of the story it begins and ends with Aduba´s Woodchipper.

Let’s cut to the chase, it’s Wills, played by Himesh Patel, first day on the job as a law officer and he is driving around with Terry played by Joseph Gordon Levitt who seems to be a mouth cop with a bad moustache and bad tendencies. Terry is such a piece of work, nearly bullying Will by blaring metal music in his car and leaving the poor green to sit outside the vehicle whilst he slips into a brief engagement with an immigrant housemaid. This is exactly the time and the place that makes one anticipate offensive humor centered around Terry making racist jokes but in actuality, he states he is learning the Chinese language in his spare time.

Of course, this is hardly the most dramatic Providence story, which such an officer – far from exemplary – says to the rookie and offers him to have leisure time. And there is hard truth in those in the first several hours in which Will can do his duties: there is an incoming call whilst Terry is busy calling the shots. Confounded about the radio code, he walks into the house of a local fish tycoon Wallace (Nelson), and walks in on his wife Virginia (Traci Lords) with disastrous (and unsurprisingly, lethal) results. Still, not everything turned out to be bad, the hysterical policemen found the cash sack inside the house and from there on decided to cover up the crime scene and most importantly how the lady accidentally died.

A scriptwriter like Mike Vukadinovich may not call upon tangible practices in his life in his works including this one on the film, and, though devoid of the shocking glamour that defines true crime, this Jerry Springer-esque plot is still quite captivating; thanks to Ponciroli’s wonderfully vivid imagination. The only mildly relatable part could be Will’s intro about his home, where his pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) who is constantly angry gets to be introduced as well.

Their family could use the money, but in a story like this, nothing comes easily. There is only one question will some fortunate person walk away with the prize or will it scatter in the wind as was the fate of the money in the classic film Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Such answers tend to be percolated with the filmmakers’ moral authority and with all that has been shown in Old Henry, in the hands of Ponciroli, it does not appear to leave anybody unharmed, not even Nelson who has a much shorter screen time in this one.

As Greedy People develops, the nonlinear script brings back different characters, and in doing so introduces even more unpleasant characters. They include Simon Rex, the masseur who was conveniently situated upstairs at Virginia’s murder, and two assassins labeled, The Irishman and The Colombian (Jim Gaffigan and José María Yazpik). But the question remains why would a small place like Providence require two gunmen? The involvement of these characters almost certainly promises a rise in the death number.

Terry is a disheveled, out of character type of role for Gordon-Levitt that is nothing more than a witnessing of a boy scout role playing as a bad cop. The film would work better if they showed him in a more threatening way (his partner certainly does), although the message of Greedy People appears to be that there are no good people in the world and that everybody becomes bad when enough gold is placed in front of them.

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