Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is the latest documentary film from Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith (Collapse, Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond), the film recounts the catastrophic music festival held in the Bahamas on April 2017 and the fraudster behind it all, Billy McFarland. Numerous employees of the Fyre musician booking app appear, as well as previous attendees who are suing both McFarland and the Fyre company.
Smith has demonstrated a deft hand on other documentaries and this one is no different. Offering a comprehensive look at the rise of McFarland and his business ventures as well as the fall of the Fyre empire, Smith had enough footage at his disposal to make an entire series and it shows. The centerpiece of this film, of course, is McFarland, an up-and-coming financial whiz that somehow spins straw into gold time and time again. Once he establishes contact with his showbiz partner Jeffrey “Ja Rule” Atkins (via social media no less), McFarland is off to the races full sprint, spending the money before he makes it.
Smith and his team assembles interviewees that recount the slow-motion train wreck, including the director of the now-infamous commercial that advertised the festival, filled with world-class supermodels. Beat by beat, step by step, we follow the house of cards (no Netflix pun intended) as the employees of Fyre and their affiliates in advertising and marketing have their stories verified by social media posts and footage. The documentary takes a sad, dark turn as we see the human toll of the façade in the Bahamian workers and staff whose months-long work went unpaid and whose faith in humanity were forever shattered.
With knowledge of the festival’s fallout, the documentary carries a sense of dread that permeates through every board meeting and location scout. The mundanity of the planning is slowly replaced with menace as McFarland leads his team toward ruin. Splashes of grim humor appear in the doc, such as the illusory Instagram posts from influencers and the gall of McFarland’s wild lies and false promises. You see McFarland’s charisma in full effect; indeed, he sells out a music festival in its first (and only) year. But once contrasted with fake illustrations of luxury villas that don’t exist, top-tier musical acts that didn’t even agree to perform, or the relocation to another Bahamian island that’s fully booked, the true-life horror story takes hold.
Smith and crew declined to interview McFarland for this doc, in their words, out of refusal to pay him so he could benefit from his crimes. In any case, McFarland’s absence hurts the documentary, leaving only second-hand accounts and footage, albeit extensive footage, to fill in the blanks. It should be noted that McFarland appears on the competing Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud, which itself has a differing perspective on the players and crew members involved. Both documentaries are notable in that they are artifacts of a marketing scheme gone wrong while functioning as tools of a different type of face-saving marketing.
Netflix’s Fyre intensifies once we get to the actual festival itself. With hundreds of hours of social-media footage to choose from, as well as the extensive real-time reaction to the horrors displayed on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we see the dark side of today’s social media age where an entire festival was built on nothing but a slick sexy video, well-placed posts, and lies. The film draws a direct through line between the falsehoods that McFarland and company told attendees and their own employees, as well as the illusory nature of a well-manicured social media page, except that in the festival, the stakes were much higher.
Smith deftly fluctuates between the absolute absurdity of the situation and the real economic and physical pains caused by the festival. It became Mad Max made manifest, a present-day apocalyptic scramble for food, water, and shelter. Some attendees were locked inside the local airport with no return flights, while other attendees took over flimsy water-soaked refugee tents and fought over mattresses. The fallout continues afterward, with the employees left to fend for themselves after Fyre folds.
In this portrait of a scam artist extraordinaire, we are faced with the prospect of our attraction to the young and charismatic, with the optimism that can lead to failed dreams. We’ve seen this in the housing market crash, we’ve seen it to ghastly effect with the cult of Jonestown decades ago. The Fyre Festival is presented as a microcosm of societal collapse, a group of people banding together to create an event without ever planning for contingencies or the worst-case scenario and ultimately ensuring that the worst-case scenario came to pass. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is a riveting tale, and even though the fraudster at the center of it all is absent, it’s still worth a watch as a modern-day caution to avoid chasing waterfalls.
Rating: 4/5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐
ABOUT FYRE
An exclusive behind the scenes look at the infamous unraveling of the Fyre music festival. Created by Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, Fyre was promoted as a luxury music festival on a private island in the Bahamas featuring bikini-clad supermodels, A-List musical performances and posh amenities. Guests arrived to discover the reality was far from the promises.
Chris Smith, the director behind the Emmy Award Nominated documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond gives a first-hand look into the disastrous crash of Fyre as told by the organizers themselves.
“FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” streams on Netflix January 18, 2019, with a run-time of 97 minutes and is rated TV-MA.
Hashtag: #FYRETheGreatestPartyThatNeverHappened
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