“Fyre” hurls the swindle at its center like a bowling ball. The movie, which Chris Smith directed, finds the players in and around a 2017 scheme to pull a music festival out of thin air: software programmers, marketing people, expert event planners, laborers, the bilked. They make it clear that Fyre probably never could have been a success, and even if you know the story of how it wasn’t, nothing stops you from rooting against it anyway. It was conceived in both bad faith and bad taste, as part of a collaboration between Billy McFarland, a 20-something con man from New Jersey, the beached middle-aged rapper Ja Rule, and a fleet of Instagram influencers.
[Read our inside account of the Fyre Festival.]
Hundreds of people bought tickets to a party on an island in the Bahamas promoted, fictionally, as once belonging to the drug lord and murderer Pablo Escobar. They were promised a luxe weekend and got soggy mattresses instead. Each movie consists of talking-head interviews. But the meat of Smith’s movie is the footage, handsome footage — of meetings, conference calls and promotional shoots; of what happened when all those kids sought food, water and a desperate exit.
You watch both movies in a kind of fascinated horror at how easy it was for McFarland to create a network of what appears to be unwitting co-conspirators to help him plan an experience that wound up losing $24 million. So many people mention how seductive and magnetic McFarland is that you also watch both movies expecting them to inspect his magnetism. To see him in Smith’s film, reveling in footage taken by other people — this chubby, gangly, awkward but not not handsome slouch who himself seems attracted to fame, power, wealth and sand — is to wonder whether those same people needed a magnet in their lives, especially one who could make them some money.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/movies/fyre-reviews.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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