Greed: A "Seven Deadly Sins" Story (RobinHood Productions, TDJ Enterprises, New Directions Entertainment, Johnson Pruduction Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched the two “premiere” movies on Lifetime from 8 p.m. to midnight: Greed: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story and The Wrong Blind Date. Greed – not to be confused with the sadly truncated but still great 1924 movie directed by Erich von Stroheim based on Frank Norris’s novel McTeague – actually turned out to be quite good, the best by a considerable margin of the four LIfetime movies so far made from Victorla Christopher Murray’s novels based on the seven deadly sins. (I understand Murray plans to write books about all seven of the deadly sins, but so far the only ones she’s actually published are Lust, Envy, Wrath and Greed. Also her Web site claims that she was “dubbed a Christian Fiction writer because no one else was writing about religious topics,” which seems to me to be very hard to believe.) The main reason Greed stood out from the others is the authenticity of the character conflicts: heroine Zuri Maxwell (Monique Coleman), a budding interior designer, thinks she’s got the break of a lifetime when she gets a job designing a nook for the formidable Vivian “Aunt Viv” Anderson (LisaRaye McCoy), with the prospect of more work to come from both Aunt Viv and others she’s connected with. The young man who’s the cousin of Aunt Viv is Godfrey Anderson (Eric Benet), who’s not only drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich (thanks to the chain of nursing homes Aunt Viv founded and runs), he buys his way into chairing the board of a foundation Zuri volunteers for, the Baltimore Literacy Project. that teaches adults to read after they missed out in acquiring that skill earlier on.

Zuri has a disabled father and lives with a boyfriend, Stephen (pronounced “Stefan”) Gardner (Nathan Witte, who’s as totally different a body type from Eric Benet as you could imagine given that they’re both relatively young Black men – like author Murray, almost all the characters in the “Seven Deadly Sins” books are Black), but his devil-may-care attitude and lack of ambition has become a flash point in the relationship and Zuri is really tired of Stephen blowing off the opportunities she keeps trying to create for him. So she’s all too vulnerable to Godfrey and his dubious charms even though it’s established early on that the Anderson nursing homes are a fraud; they survive on sending Medicaid bills for services not rendered and they’re engaging in whatever dodges Aunt Viv’s fertile mind can think up. Godfrey puts Zuri on the board of the Baltimore Literacy Project, but it’s only a pretext so she can unwittingly help him loot the proceeds of the project for his own use and use it to launder the dirty money that’s keeping Aunt Viv’s nursing homes afloat. She finds out she’s been duped when one of her prize students, a middle-aged Black man who drifted into the gangster life and did a prison sentence works hard, gets his G.E.D. and applies for college, ends up not being able to continue because the Baltimore Literacy Project was supposed to pay his tuition, only it couldn’t because Godfrey had done such a good job looting the foundation that it’s broke.

The screenwriters of Greed, Wuese Houston-Jibo and Monique N. Matthews, do a great job dramatizing the moral conflicts between Zuri’s honesty and the increasing level of financial crime the Andersons are drawing herselt into, including padding her invoices as an interior designer. Greed has its failings – not only does Zuri’s father have a bad fall down stairs the night she and Godfrey fly to Barbados for the weekend and they have sex for the first time (thereby adding this to the bizarre list of movies Charles and I went to see at press screenings 20 years ago in which a person near and dear to the heroine had to die or suffer a health crisis so she could get laid), but at the end Aunt Viv turns from a tightly controlled woman whose only crimes are financial to a full-blooded psychopath determined to kill Zuri, Godfrey and Stephen and burn her own house down to do it. The idea is to make it look like Stephen caught Godfrey and Zuri in bed together, and in a jealous rage Stephen shot them both and then burned down the house and committed suicide. Also adding dimension to this unexpectedly good movie are the quotes interspersed through it, which sound Biblical even though my husband, Reverend Charles, thought only the final quote was actually authentic. Somehow the quotes, whether they’re bona fide Biblical or made up by Murray, Houston-Jibo or Matthews, help better integrate Murray’s “inspirational” message into the script and make the film’s moral center seem an integral part of the story instead of just seeming patched on the way they did in Lust, Envy or Wrath. At the end Stephen rescues Zuri from the crazy Andersons and they’re both arrested (not killed this time), with Aunt Viv sentenced to life imprisonment and Godfrey to 30 years, while Zuri and Stephen reconcile – much to the joy of Zuri’s dad, who never lined Godfrey and thought Stephen was a better match for his daughter even before we knew Godfrey was a crook.