Review: Fyre Is an Empathetic Look at an Epic Fail

Chris Smith’s documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival implosion resists the urge to revel in cheap social media schadenfreude.

Fyre
Photo: Netflix

The video ads for the Fyre Festival looked amazing when they first rippled through the Instagram feeds of influencer models like Bela Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski in late 2016. For a certain kind of status-seeker, marooned somewhere cold and just waiting for the next warm-climate EDM gathering, the marketing for the music festival promised a bro heaven populated only by models. The lavish images of white-sand beaches and Jet Skis cutting slashes across crystal-blue waters were interspersed with slow-mo laser-strobed nighttime concert footage and promises of “an immersive music festival” featuring “the best in food, art, music, and adventure” on a “remote and private island once owned by Pablo Escobar.” The implication was that of a more exclusive Coachella in the Caribbean.

What director Chris Smith’s incisive and infuriating Fyre reveals isn’t that the founders—the unlikely team of Manhattan VIP party promoter Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule—promised something audacious and failed to pull it off, but that it was a smoke-and-mirrors scam all along. As everyone knows, Fyre imploded spectacularly, with festivalgoers showing up in April 2017 to discover no restful bungalows, supermodels, or VIP dining, but rather a half-built concert stage and some rain-soaked tents. The same hot-take networks that emoji’d the hell out of the original announcements couldn’t wait to mock the attendees—many of whom had paid thousands of dollars—for their naïveté.

From American Movie to Jim & Andy, Smith has shown himself to be nothing if not an empathic filmmaker. So instead of indulging in an easy round of social media schadenfreude, he investigates who and what was behind it all. The result is closer to a Frontline episode on Bernie Madoff than something like Netflix’s shallow and irksome faux-documentary The American Meme. Working in collaboration with Vice Media, whose reporting seems to provide most of the grist for Fyre’s mill, Smith interviews various former employees of McFarland and Rule’s organization. Nearly all of them exhibit the sort of dazed disbelief registered by the victims of a Ponzi scheme. The story Smith extracts from them is part old-fashioned scam and part millennial suspension of disbelief.

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The original and far less exciting concept for the Fyre Festival concocted by McFarland and Rule was to produce a category-killer app for booking talent. With the kind of hubris that comes from too many Manhattan nights spent behind velvet ropes swilling champagne, McFarland and Rule concocted the idea of a music festival that would essentially be a launch promotion for the app, “the Uber of booking talent.” They paid a platoon of supermodels to party in the Bahamas with McFarland and Rule while being filmed by a team of marketers who then cut the footage into a white-sand VIP fantasia.

Smith covers the known part of the fiasco in sharp detail, showing how an overwhelmed and inexperienced team worked like dogs over the course of four months to pull off the kind of festival that normally takes a good year of planning. The interviewees tell Smith it was readily apparent that there was no “there” there. (Nobody thought to book the music for a supposedly transformative music festival until almost the last minute, at which point the organizers managed to scrape up Blink-182 and Major Lazer.) But they soldiered on, nearly universally in thrall to the mystique of McFarland, a Steve Jobs-ian figure of limitless cheery chutzpah who had always pulled off the impossible before.

The film reaches an almost fever pitch as the festival’s opening approaches and the Fyre team’s moxie starts to dissolve in panic at the swirl of chaos engulfing them and their leader’s glassy refusal to admit defeat. Smith’s narrative threads are then knitted into a dark realization about the festival: Not only was the tail wagging the dog, but there may never have been a dog to start with. Stylistically, Fyre isn’t particularly unique. It doesn’t have the vérité grit of American Movie, the panicky paranoid atmospherics of Collapse, or the inside-out meta-narrative of Jim & Andy. In terms of format, this is straightforward cine-journalism with a clear point of view and a riveting story.

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What Smith brings to the documentary isn’t just an assembling of footage along a narrative pathway. He invests the story with a humanity that nearly all the earlier news coverage of the debacle had missed. While chronicling McFarland’s misdeeds, Smith keeps a focus on the true victims. The most salient moments in Fyre admittedly aren’t the dramatic cascade of chaos leading up to the final collapse, or even the brazen scams McFarland continued to pull off afterward—once again, promising exclusive access to things that he couldn’t deliver but pocketing the cash anyway. Instead they come when Smith shows the infuriated Bahamian laborers who worked grueling schedules for weeks, or the tearful local businesswoman who lost her life savings. These are the black, working-class voices who never featured in all the ha-ha finger pointing after the festival’s implosion. They’re the ones who went unpaid so that a Manhattan grifter could, as he put it, “sell a pipe dream to the average loser.”

Score: 
 Director: Chris Smith  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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