The pivotal scene in 99 Homes documents an eviction. An even-tempered real estate agent, donning a crisp shirt and a blue blazer, pounds on the door of a lower-middle-class Orlando home, backed up by county sheriffs and local police. “Mr. Nash!” goes the collective roar, each knock and exclamation louder than the last. Inside, the Nash family reacts: Dennis (Andrew Garfield) frantically panics, straining to calm his son while facing the imminent reality of losing everything; Dennis’ mother Lynn (Laura Dern), meanwhile, tries to stay calm. “It’s a mistake,” she repeats, with some combination of certitude and hopelessness.
But in this world, pleas for sympathy get you nowhere. The scene is agonizingly meticulous, not a second lost between realtor Rick Carver’s (Michael Shannon) first knock on the door and the Nash’s eventual, forced departure. They drive away in a rusty green pickup stuffed with every remnant of their lives – mattresses, dressers, toys, bills. There’s an energy to the entire scene, the score thudding through intensely brief close-ups, and 99 Homes, in the ninety minutes to follow, never lets it go.
99 Homes is a bracingly direct condemnation of the capitalist greed and institutional failures that have come to overwhelm American life. The Nash family is positioned at the apex of the 2010 national housing crisis. Dennis’ jobs are being eaten away by the economic climate that’s swallowed him whole – he builds houses, but everyone else is busy destroying them – while Lynn runs a hair salon business out of the home she was pushed out of. They relocate to a motel filled with people of similar stories. One woman asks Dennis how long they plan to stay; he quickly responds, “Just a couple of nights.” She surveys the motel complex and says with a sympathetic grin, “I said that two years ago.” Not much else to say.
Director Ramin Bahrani, who with 99 Homes has tenuously and acutely narrativized our income inequality epidemic, begins with the story of one family’s forced resignation from the middle class. But his canvas is wider. The film, initially an effective pastiche of the socially-charged ‘70s thriller, evolves into a contemporary Faustian tale – the story of making a deal with Rick Carver, the epitomization of the Housing Crisis-era devil. Dennis is in desperate need of money, and Carver requires a versatile handyman. Thus, they promptly shake hands, and they’re off – foreclosing, evicting and shattering dreams, one house at a time.
Their methods are dubious, unethical – often, even illegal. Carver tasks Dennis to steal appliances and AC units from vacated homes; to forge documents and thus establish evictions on ridiculous technicalities; and to present flailing homeowners with “cash for keys” buyouts, to essentially steal their homes for bribes in the low-four-figures. Carver considers himself less a monster than the product of a do-or-die system. He blames residents borrowing more than they could ever afford, but also the banks for making them believe in the practicality of a loan. He exploits federal agencies like Fannie Mae by slipping into their loopholes, but not without making deals with elected officials at various levels of government. The system, his actions constantly dictate, is beyond repair: Carver used to sell homes, but now, to survive, he’s left to figure out the most profitable way to destroy them.
99 Homes is punishingly intelligent, exposing, piece-by-piece, how corruption festers as hope fades. Dennis’ middleman status, as a construction worker in a time themed by vacant McMansions and overcrowded motels, devolves into No Man’s Land. His trade can only be properly compensated for by the very man rigging the industry and buying up the whole damn state. Materially, Dennis rises – but at the cost of knocking on friends’ and neighbors’ doors, and doing exactly to them as was done to him. Carver tells him that “America” is all and only about winners and losers. You’ve heard the line before – hell, contemporary American fiction practically lives and dies on that theme – but there’s an immediacy to 99 Homes that gives the line an added punch. Bahrani is consumed by the economic divide, visualizing it with exclamatory rage. Dennis’ interactions with fellow evictees, or with his mother as she comes to realize his purchased soul, never fail to devastate; his relationship with Carver emerges as one of perverse understanding, with both somewhat displaced by patriarchal structures that have let them down.
You know the film’s streets, too. Bahrani’s Florida isn’t glamorized; there’s less attention on the sun than on the haze blurring the sky. It’s a muggy landscape peppered by glistening fake-lakes. Bahrani juxtaposes Floridian palaces overlooking brown-blue ponds and adjacent mansions with rows of “little boxes” cruelly labeled by their vacant signs and eviction notices. It’s the foreclosure era’s Wild West: the community’s architecture melds the gorgeously fake with the hideously real, and the sheriff in town is the realtor wearing the pale blue jacket.
But 99 Homes isn’t quite a Western. It’s a potent melodrama, searingly conveyed by a trio of actors immersed in this world of hot, humid lawlessness. Garfield has more than established his talent, but Hollywood has often seemed at a loss, in terms of what to do with him. Here, he’s frighteningly raw, and he makes far more interesting choices than this typically Faustian narrative might encourage. Dern, in a limited but critical role, delves with him into the persona of the Florida working class. She spews out her dialogue with a rough rhythm, her jittery expressiveness and gawky movements at once heartbreakingly endearing and plainly authentic.
All elements orbit around Shannon, however. His Carver works with a modernly-stylized business acumen, always equipped with an e-cig and a gun in his holster. He’s less heartless than pragmatic – driven by his “don’t get emotional about real estate” mantra. In one fearsome monologue, with Bahrani holding the camera still, Shannon wrestles through Carver’s past, his relationship to his father, and the entire system of fraud and exploitation that he’s single-handedly developed. The actor brilliantly peels back Carver’s mask of objectivity, revealing the emotional undercurrent to his nastily capitalist enterprise.
Bahrani constructs the film as a tightly-wound thriller, the suspense sustained from scene to scene, and act to act. In that regard, 99 Homes keeps you close to its emotions and its ideas. The film loses itself slightly in the concluding scene, which half-heartedly dismisses the more personal conflicts in favor of an elongated shoot-out, but its final shot miraculously revives it. 99 Homes is a vast and powerful chronicle, taking up residence in the very embodiment of the American Dream: the home. Homes were the goals, what couples and families were supposed to strive for, what they’d borrow anything to get. The symbol of the Dream Achieved.
That vision is now dismantled, with homes emptied out, boxed up, taken down and debased with signs and notices and money-grubbing agents. One could call Rick Carver the dismantler: the figure so effortlessly swiping these houses, and these lives, away. But he’s not taking away the American Dream. He’s only proving that it’s already gone.
Grade: A-