Admit it. You WANTED to read this review more because of the picture of hot girls running on a beach partying. That instinct is at the heart of Fyre, Netflix’s documentary about the famously doomed music festival. Director Chris Smith avoids a glitzy shallow look like Fyre’s CEO Billy McFarland, instead finding something real underneath something so hilariously, cruelly, fake.
The Fyre Festival, for those who don’t remember, was supposed to be the next big music festival. It was marketed toward the super rich, offering kickass music, and glamping (glamorous camping) on Pablo Escobar’s old island in the Bahamas. The marketer was the Fyre company, led by entrepreneur (con artist?) Billy McFarland, and Ja Rule, famous R&B singer. Using various models like Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, the master marketer convinced all these rich kids to fork over thousands of dollars….only to end up in what looks like a hurricane relief camp, causing the festival, and the company, to shut down and embrace the fallout of their failures.
For the first half of the film, director Smith shoots the film as a countdown clock to D-Day, propelling Fyre forward. We get introduced to all the key players, and how all of them get caught up in Billy’s vision and charisma, enjoying the party Billy essentially throws them on the island with the models and entertainers. That big promotional gimmick does wonders for the Fyre company, getting all sorts of rich people to commit money for the party and Billy’s big dream. Then the clock starts. And little things start going wrong. Little promises start getting broken. A site goes up disputing what Billy’s selling. You start to see the team bring these things up to management, only for Billy to dismiss them, saying they’re not looking for solutions, which funny enough, rhymes with delusions. As the clock gets closer and closer to D-Day, these little things become big giant problems, like paying the people building the site, housing everyone, and one especially cruel request to help bring in Evian water from customs. By this point, Billy’s delusions aren’t fooling most of the people close to him, instead demanding money that they’re due for their services. This all culminates in the dumpster fire of the 1 day of the Fyre Festival, where the delusional rich kids thinking they’re getting glamping are being duped by a delusional promoter thinking he’s putting on the next Bonaroo, eventually getting destroyed by an Instagram post of a cheese sandwich. Fitting since Instagram fueled the fire (I had to, once) of this festival.
And then Smith pivots the movie toward when reality starts hitting, and what that means for Billy McFarland and everyone at Fyre. Again, this first starts out lightly, with all these rich kid talking heads complaining that they got duped, where you can’t help but laugh at them a little. However, the movie starts becoming less and less funny as you see how much delusion has fueled the people at the top of the company. In the immediate aftermath of the festival, the executives have a company conference call, where clearly all the Fyre developers, who don’t market, clearly see what the promoters don’t: that this brand is TOXIC, and it’s time to rebrand immediately and get out. However, Billy and Ja Rule sit there arguing with them because they are financially invested, manipulating their words to make the employees feel guilty when the blame clearly resides with the dipsh*t CEO. This delusion isn’t on the surface cruel, but Chris Smith goes underneath all the fraud to see the real fallout of the Fyre festival, not just the Instagram one. The local workers who built as much as they could under timeline duress were defrauded out of at least $250k. The hired restaurant owners lost most of their savings and are barely in business. The Fyre company workers were simply not paid and forced to quit to search for work so Billy didn’t have to pay them benefits, just to name a few. And where is Billy through all of this, onto his next scam, using someone else to be the front for the company to absolve him of guilt. And here I am helping prop up this guy with free publicity mocking his last failure. This complicated American situation is what makes Fyre so watchable and more captivating than it has any right to be.
Why is it that when the rich screw something up, the poor are left to clean up their messes? Fyre is yet another example of this truly American artform of defrauding people through glitz and glam. Don’t believe me? This isn’t the only Fyre Festival documentary out THIS WEEK, that’s how good this story is. I feel icky…