Money Chasing Case File #163 Greedy (1994)

Choose your fighter!

While Phil Hartman more than realized his extraordinary potential as a television performer with Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons and NewsRadio and made an important contribution to cinema as the co-screenwriter of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure the movies he made in his all too brief life and career seldom utilized the full depth and range of his extraordinary abilities. 

Jonathan Lynn’s maddening 1994 comedy-drama Greedy is a good example of how movies failed Hartman. The comic genius absolutely destroys as Frank, a malevolent schemer with the cold, dead eyes of a shark, a heavily moused lummox of a son he can’t stand, a sonorous purr of a voice and a cash register where his heart and soul should be. 

Greedy gets off to a deceptively nasty and sharp start thanks in no small part to Hartman and his amazing instant chemistry with the murderer’s row of terrific character actors playing relations of Kirk Douglas’ Uncle Jack angling for his fortune: Ed Begley Jr’s Carl, Bob Balaban’s Ed, Coleen Camp’s Patti and Jere Burns’ Glen. 

These are all dependable pros born to play toxic cousins scheming shamelessly for a vain old man’s millions. When the movie focuses on the family at the very beginning, Greedy is a tart and sardonic delight, full of quotable dialogue masterfully performed and wonderfully nasty. When Hartman gets a line like “I didn’t like the Beatles, and I don’t like you!” he absolutely destroys but director Jonathan Lynn seems intent on ensuring the film’s roster of scene-stealers do not get a chance to steal the film from stars from Michael J. Fox and Kirk Douglas to its eternal detriment.

We open, perversely, with nearly three minutes of an ancient clip of Jimmy Durante performing “Inka Dinka Doo”, an early indication that the silver screen legend at the center of the film will be very old, yet also somehow way too vigorous to play someone whose relatives expect to kick the bucket at any moment, making someone or some people very rich in the process. Greedy isn’t just a dad movie: it’s a grandpa movie as well that caters shamelessly to the AARP demographic.

We then follow with the nieces and nephews of scrap metal magnate and ornery old buzzard Uncle Joe (Kirk Douglas) as they gather together at his mansion for his birthday party to jockey for position in his fickle heart and with it a place of prominence in a will that is seemingly all anyone can think about, including Uncle Joe. 

Uncle Joe isn’t just disliked by his nieces and nephews: he’s an existential threat. When his nieces and nephews think he might be dead they’re overjoyed, ecstatic. Needless to say, everyone is very let down when the ambulance at Uncle Joe’s estate turns out to be for his personal physician and not for him.

The cousins have hired detectives to dig up dirt on each other that they can bring up their egregious faults in conversation around the wheelchair-bound King Lear figure to make them look bad, like a hit and run by Hartman’s wife he brushes aside as nothing, since “Everyone was fine, the kids, the nuns.”

In the kind of virtuoso turn that made Hartman such an innately hilarious performer, the volume steadily decreases with each word, so that “the nuns” is barely audible. 

Begley Jr’s rude brood is a highlight. There’s a great moment when Uncle Jack, who is forthright in a manner only the way the truly rich can afford to be, says to one of the boys, “So you’re interested in money, are you?” and he replies, with just the right note of precocious calculation, “I got ten bucks just for coming here. I get another twenty if I kiss you.” 

Then, with Henny Youngman timing, he concludes, “I’m thinking about it.” Like Hartman, Begley Jr, Balaban, Camp and Burns, the child actor only needs a tiny amount of screen time to make an indelible impression. That’s both good and bad for him because the bratty kid more or less disappears from the movie, as do his parents. 

Greedy is never funnier or stronger than during its acidic, wonderfully sardonic first few scenes, which have a very specific, British and bleak sense of humor. Then the movie shifts its focus from its terrific ensemble to name above the title star Michael J. Fox, who plays frustrated professional bowler Danny and the movie’s comic tone doesn’t just change sharply; the movie quickly fails to be a comedy at all. 

Danny’s father earned the grudging respect of his family by being the one member willing to stand up to Joe and his bullying, intimidating ways decades earlier, in the process giving up any future claim to Joe’s fortune. As a child, Danny won a special place in his uncle’s heart by doing a Jimmy Durante impersonation for him and not being as nakedly avaricious and evil as his one-dimensional but entertaining cousins. 

Great. Now you’ve got Kirk Douglas staring at ya!

Danny doesn’t want to compete hungrily at the trough for his uncle’s fortune but his undistinguished career as an athlete is coming to an appropriately undistinguished end and he needs 300,000 dollars to invest in a big new bowling complex, a relative pittance to an uncle rumored to be worth more than twenty million dollars. 

Uncle Joe is willing to give his nephew the money he desperately craves with a brutal condition: he wants Danny to call up his father and renounce him and his lefty belief system for the sake of his malicious enjoyment. Danny refuses on principle but he’s sorely tempted by the prospect of a big payday all the same, particularly when the primary competition is Molly Richardson (Olivia D’Abo), a scantily-clad former pizza delivery woman in her mid-20s serving as Uncle Joe’s live-in nurse who may or may not be having sex with her randy and eager employer. 

Will Danny compromise his ethics and his decency for the sake of all that loot? How far will he stoop for the money to realize his dreams? Is Molly sleeping with Joe? Are her feelings towards him pure or is she as motivated by greed as his relatives? Who cares? 

The filmmakers seem to worry that audiences won’t want to spend time with the nasty relatives on account of they’re not likable or sympathetic and also they’re not played by huge movie stars. They don’t seem to realize that the characters who are played by box-office names aren’t terribly likable or sympathetic either but also aren’t anywhere near as funny or memorable or sharply conceived as the assholes in Uncle Joe’s bloodline. 

Like everyone in his life, Danny is corrupted by the promise of his uncle’s fortune. He hires an actor to portray his father so that he can renounce him in favor of Joe without doing so in real life. Ah, but Joe has a few cards up his sleeve as well, leading a movie that once radiated ample promise down the road to hell. 

Greedy’s big, shitty twist is that the millions the family and Molly are warring over doesn’t actually exist, since Joe’s finances have ostensibly nose-dived to the point that he’s now 95,000 dollars in debt rather than twenty million dollars ahead. 

Despite being played by a living legend, Uncle Joe comes off less as a rascally, larger-than-life scamp you can’t help but love than a giant asshole wasting everyone’s time and energy with his narcissistic cruelty and cold machinations. 

Being a good dude in spite of everything, Danny agrees to look after a destitute uncle who has lied and manipulated him and treated him with astonishing callousness, at which point we learn that Joe was pulling one of his patented mix-em-ups all along, and that he’s actually still rich as shit, and was testing his nephew all along with the help of Molly and his butler. 

Danny says he’ll only accept his good fortune if his uncle stops with the lies and deceit, at which point he agrees and then happily hops out of his wheelchair.

If Greedy had stuck to the bracingly dark, misanthropic black comedy of its opening scenes, having the ostensibly wheelchair bound multi-millionaire and all around flaming piece of human garbage respond to Danny’s insistence on no more lies, manipulation or games by genially hopping out of wheelchair might represent an inspired final sick joke. But since the movie abandons dark comedy and comedy altogether pretty early on and spends a solid hour trying to make us care about these men, their souls and their relationship, this final twist feels not only counter-productive and unearned but angry-making and self-defeating. 

By the end of Greedy, we have been manipulated and lied to as much as Uncle Joe’s family. Like every family member other than Danny, we don’t get anything out of it, only the company of a seriously unpleasant old man whose shtick is never as cute or as funny as he thinks it is. 

Uncle Joe’s need to constantly test his family and the audience’s patience in increasingly sadistic, elaborate and gratingly unrealistic ways reminded me of the horrible things Jeremy Saville did to his fiancé to prove to himself she’s worthy of a sociopathic monster like himself in the auteur’s pre-Loqueesha atrocity The Test rather than Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. 

Needless to say it’s never a good thing when the work of master storytellers like Greedy screenwriters Babaloo Mandell and Lowell Ganz, uncontested titans of their craft, recall the work of that singularly untalented, misguided neophyte. 

Greedy goes so far out of its way to be the best possible vehicle for its marquee stars that it ends up shortchanging its dynamite supporting cast. Hartman is characteristically funny and sharp in a movie that disastrously decides to give up on laughs early in favor of family drama that serves its star’s egos at the expense of the film itself. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure 

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