GREEDY, PAYDIRT, GOLDEN BALLS
MONEY is probably the most powerful word in American movies and it’s the theme of three films now on circuit.
In the amusing domestic comedy Greedy, Daniel (Michael J Fox) and assorted relatives badger rich old Uncle Joe (Kirk Douglas) for money — they think he’s about to die. The funny, offbeat Paydirt is about stolen money buried in the cellar of a suburban house. And in Spanish director Lunas Biga’s excellent Golden Balls, ambition, money and sex go together — everything rises: the building Benito (Javier Bardem) builds, a phallic statue on his balcony, and his financial status.
Trust the Spanish to make this connection explicit, and then get a tough satire out of it: Benito’s a chauvanist, but when he can’t rise to the sexual occasion any more, the movie — in a comical but serious way — shows how the combined pressures of money, sex and ambition get a man down.
Americans tend to divorce sex and money — the one buys the other. In Greedy Uncle Joe can afford a sexy blonde to take care of him. Golden Balls doesn’t really worry about pushing morals: its satire is also in its visual theatricality, suggesting all is sham.
Greedy works best when it pokes fun at Uncle Joe’s greedy family — it is tart and sharp — but then it gets soft-headed and sentimental about Daniel, lets him impersonate Jimmy Durante and makes him rich in the end, so all the satire’s negated.
Paydirt, in which families dig for buried money, is better. It’s a satire on suburbia, and becomes an absurd comedy about the absurdity of greed. The film’s deliberately offbeat, but quite subversive in the way it targets happy families, showing, without too much preaching, that money and greed make everyone silly.
But if money makes the world go round, it makes a lot of movies happen, too, and for my money Biga wins in the current batch. His comedy, crude as it is, has more movie value than the others.
Fabius Burger