99 Homes (2015)
R
4 Stars out of 5
Director/Editor Ramin Bahrani
Writer Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi, Bahareh Azimi
Cinematography Bobby Bukowski
Music Antony Partos, Matteo Zingales
Rick Carver Michael Shannon
Andrew Garfield Dennis Nash
Noah Lomax Connor Nash
Laura Dern Lynn Nash
Tim Guinee Frank Greene
The 2008 housing bubble collapse in the United States is beginning to prove to be ample fodder for film makers (e.g. see 2015 Oscar Best Movie nominee “The Big Short”). Movies like “The Big Short” have focused on the malfeasance and fraud perpetuated by Wall Street bankers. Ramin Bahrani has chosen in his 2015 offering, “99 Homes” to cast a double focus: on a system that favors local banks and to a lesser degree on the people thrown out of their homes by those same local banks. To his credit, Bahrani has added a Mephistophelean deal in his story as he frames the overall arc of the film about the decisions made by one man recently evicted with his son and widowed mother from their Orlando home. Temporarily homeless and unemployed, his belongings sitting on a street curb, he makes a fateful decision to work for the “Devil”; the same man that had just evicted him.
Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) opens the movie in a
well-crafted courtroom scene. Nash has roughly 60 seconds to convince a judge
to issue a stay on his eviction. The Judge (Richard Holden) is exasperated and
highly overworked as he tries to quickly move through hundreds of cases just
like Nash’s. The Judge checks the paperwork for accuracy and “sentences” Nash
to eviction. Nash tries to argue but there is no winning argument for him in
this scenario; he ends up being evicted from the courtroom as well. Nash will
return home to his mother, Lynn (Laura Dern) and son, Connor (Noah Lomax). The
mother is a home-based hair stylist and seems utterly uncomprehending of their
pending fate. The son being only 9 is equally in a daze. Nash as the
responsible party in this small family desperately searches through his legal papers.
He remains convinced that there is hope; he hangs all his hopes on the Judge’s
comment that he has 30 days to file an appeal. The Nash family consequently and
understandably believes they have 30 days more in their home.
They don’t. The next day, real agent Rick Carver (Michael
Shannon) shows up with two Sheriff Deputies and a work crew to evict the Nashs
and to place all of their property on the curb in front of the house they still
think is their home. The scene of their eviction, their incomprehension, their
assertion of their property rights to the deputies and Carver is heartrending. (Indeed,
during this scene and several others of high tension Music Directors Antony
Partos and Matteo Zingales have written a score that emphasizes the frantic
beating of a human heart.) The Nashs stand in the street amongst their
furnishings with a mixture of despair and loss that Director Bahrani wants the
viewer to feel as well as view. He will contrast this view with a later scene
with Rick Carver at one of his two opulent mansions: one with a presumed wife, the other
with an apparent mistress. The contrast between the wealthy, their greed and lack of
empathy versus the blue collar family forced into a hotel filled with other evicted
families just like theirs is intentional and is one of the highlights of the
film. The Nash’s eviction is one that will be repeated several times throughout
the movie, sometimes with elderly homeowners, sometimes with African-Americans,
sometimes with families that are not only like the Nashs but are in fact
neighbors and friends.
The best aspect of the movie though is the alluded to deal
made by the evicted Nash. He goes to see Carver after his eviction in a vain
search for tools the thinks Carver’s eviction team stole while evicting Nash.
Because of Nash’s bravado and tenacity in seeking his tools, Carver sees something
in Nash that he believes will be of value to Carver as he continues his “real
estate” business based on eviction. Carver will make the point very clear what
kind of real estate business he is in as he later rationalizes his actions to
Nash in an attempt to convince Nash to come work for him. Besides stating on
multiple occasions that Nash should not become emotionally attached to houses (they
are after all, just boxes, and one is just like the next), Carver will make his
most telling point when he tells Nash that he was once a loser that made his
living as a real estate agent putting people into homes, but now he is a winner
as he evicts people from their homes, and he becomes the new owner in the
process. Venality and greed could not be made plainer. Just like the courtroom
scene that emphasized that there is no hope for the soon-to-be evicted in the
law, or by the two deputies sent to carry out the eviction and who refer to
Carver as “Boss”, there is no hope anywhere for those caught in the situation
of having falling behind on their loans, for whatever reason. To be sure, some
blame must be placed on the homeowner, but this movie makes it quite clear
there is plenty of blame to be shared by the state, the banks, and by the
various investor/leeches that move in to take advantage of a system designed
not to protect the homeowner, but rather is in fact designed to protect the
bank. Those without power and wealth will inevitably lose, while those with the
influence their money can buy will as always come out the winners.
This movie is at its strongest when it gives free rein to
Michael Shannon and his portrayal of a modern demon. Just like other fallen
demons, Rick Carver once tried to make it as an honest and moral being.
However, refusing to follow his roofer father into poverty, Carver (it’s hard
to ignore the choice of names here) slashes his way through neighborhoods
looking for those on the edge of eviction. Of course, once he heads down this
path, Carver finds it easier and easier to not just bend the rules but to
actually break them: he has his new man Nash remove A/C units from empty homes
so he can charge the government to replace them, he forges documents in order
to facilitate evictions and writes his actions off as merely “correcting” a
filing error, he blithely ignores the pain and suffering he is adding to the
world. He reminds me of the Jacob Marley character in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”,
as he slowly adds link to link in an already long chain of misery attached to
him. However, as miserable an example of human behavior the Carver character
is, Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of the conflicted Nash is an even more
interesting character. To some degree like Carver before him, Nash slowly
converts from evicted and outraged man of conscience to petty Carver minion to
active evictor to eventually his breaking point. Near the movie’s climax, the
Nash character must make a decision to help in the eviction of neighbor and
friend Frank Greene (Tim Guinee). He clearly is torn as he must decide to
violate one of the last few strands of his moral code, if not in fact the
law as well. He makes a fateful decision, the consequences, the movie leaves to
some degree ambiguous.
This movie has very good acting from Shannon and Garfield;
in fact, it is worth watching for Shannon’s performance alone. The directing is
very effective along with the editing and sound track in creating a taut movie,
filled with a sense of doom and despair. The anger and incomprehension of the
evicted shows some of the best aspects of the writing and directing. There is
some weakness in the writing in terms of creating back stories for the evicted that
have little more than set piece appearances in the movie. But even in the case
of Carver and Nash, their back stories are only poorly described. A consequence
of this is that it is hard to relate to either character as people; it is far
easier and is perhaps Bahrani’s intention that we relate to them only as stereotypes;
in the case of Carver and Nash, as the Devil and Faust, respectively. That
being said, this is a first rate movie that is clearly felt most strongly by
the writer/director as a statement about the powerlessness of the common man in
the face of remorseless greed that comes from banks, speculators, and even from
at least one of their own. The movie is worth seeing as an examination of how
the evicted are treated as well as to enjoy the acting of Shannon and Garfield.
