by Brendan Foley
99 Homes, new on Blu-ray and DVD, opens with Michael Shannon scowling at the blood-soaked corpse of a man who has just committed suicide while sitting on a toilet, which sets the tone for one of the bleakest examinations of modern American economic madness that I’ve seen in recent years.
We are introduced to Andrew Garfield’s Dennis Nash in similarly bleak circumstances. Nash is part of a construction crew midway through building a house when the word comes down that there is no money to build homes anymore. Everyone has to go, no pay. Director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani underlines and highlights his point: this is no longer a country that builds things, this is a country where everyone fights over whatever scraps are left from the boom times.
That’s certainly how Shannon’s Carver (this is not a subtle film) views the world. A former real estate broker, Carver watched as the bubble burst and the housing market imploded, leaving an entire nation debt ridden and broken-backed. In this world where all conventional morality has been flipped upside, Carver emerges as the perfectly-formed parasite, a man who feeds off the downtrodden and wealthy alike, foreclosing on homes only to nickel-and-dime the re-sell.
This is what puts him and Nash on a collision course, as Nash is one of the homeowners on Carver’s chopping block. In short order, Nash finds himself stripped of his family home and left to make out some kind of living for his son and mother (Laura Dern). When circumstances bring the men back into each other’s orbits, Carver offers employment. Namely: Nash must now do to other people what Carver did to him.
At its best, 99 Homes resembles a kind of millennial Blue Collar, the seminal Paul Schrader film which saw Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor, and Yaphet Kotto as workers on the assembly line slowly being ground into dust by the endless grind of modern times. 99 Homes updates a similar struggle to a time when blue collar employment itself is becoming a scarce commodity, and the only way that struggling people can find to keep their heads afloat is to buy into the system that has betrayed and failed them.
It’s a world that doesn’t resemble anything like logic or morality, and Michael Shannon reigns over it as a blonde-haired Mephistopheles, buffing endlessly at his e-cigarette and sizing up every person and location that he comes across with a shark’s hunger. Shannon has built a nice career for himself playing an endless series of madmen and loose cannons, but Carver (despite the constant presence of multiple guns on his person) is much more even-keeled than you might expect from that resume. He’s not ‘evil’ in the way we generally define; he’s just the rat on board a sinking ship that figured out how to get to higher ground before the others.
Garfield is at an interesting place in his own career. With the failure of his Spider-Man series, he’s in an awkward place between teeny-bopped heartthrob and adult actor, a gap he’s going to have to make smart choices to clear. He’s very strong in the film, credible as a guy who has come up without much. Garfield even seems believable as a father to a young son, something I would not have expected from the emo-est of Peter Parkers.
Bahrani surrounds his two leading men with an ensemble of faces far removed from Los Angeles beauty salons. Outside of the Garfield and Shannon and a few other familiar folks like Dern or The Kurgan (yes, I know Clancy Brown has a name and that name is Clancy Brown but, c’mon, he’s The Kurgan), the cast is loaded with local faces that possess more character and life than your usual hand-picked pretty people. The scenes of Garfield trying to remove people from their homes take on an almost docu-drama feel, as if Bahrani simply tossed his leading man into this deep end and set back to film it. Most uncomfortable is a bit where Garfield and the sheriff’s department are trying to remove an old man who barely seems to understand where he is, let alone the complexities of real estate law that have just cost him his house.
And the whole time this guy is talking about his dead wife, his son that abandoned him, the neighbors he doesn’t know, you see all the woe and loss on his face and the camera will cut to Garfield, trying to be the nice guy, trying to figure something out for this guy and slowly realizing that there is no helping him, or any of the other people he’s been sent to toss out. In that scene, and in many other scenes, Bahrani strikes deep at the human cost of the economic crash, bringing that miserable toll into your home in living color.
As Nash falls deeper and deeper into Carver’s business (not especially reluctantly), the movie and camera both begin to widen their scope. The crusty motels and dilapidated houses are replaced by helicopter shots of urban landscapes and carefully assembled rows of hundreds of anonymous box houses.
It’s as the movie goes along that the plot kicks in and 99 Homes loses a step. Instead of trusting the inherent conflict between Nash and Carver and bringing it to a boil, Bahrani’s script starts indulging in corporate espionage and elaborate business dealings, which pull the movie further and further away from its strongest points. Instead of those quiet moments of raw humanity, 99 Homes has a third act loaded with BIG, DRAMATIC moments. It never quite adds up and it leaves both Garfield and Shannon struggling to maintain their characters’ centers as the film morphs into something more elaborate than the much more successful two-hander that it began as.
Disappointment with the home stretch aside, 99 Homes feels like an essential film for the time. The information it contains would likely be otherwise consigned to dry news reports or lists of statistical data. At its best, 99 HOMES uses film, the ultimate engine of empathy yet created, as a means to bring those statistics into full-bodied, full-bloodied life. It’s not the most flattering of mirrors, but it’s one that a lot of us need to look in.