Review of 99 Homes (2015) by Jack G — 02 Oct 2015

99 Homes is set in 2010, but we aren't given that information until more than halfway through the film. It doesn't matter, as the events of the film - taking place in Orlando, Florida - could be taking place right now (perhaps new regulations have been set up to stop such rampant foreclosures, but it's hard to say how much has changed in a few years). But that goes a way to show how in-the-moment and forceful Ramin Bahrani's fifth feature film is: it feels this world so deeply, in large part because many of the actors (outside of the main stars) are not, far as one can tell, professional actors. But more on that in a moment.

The story of the film starts and kicks off due to Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a contractor and construction worker, not being able to may his mortgage bills on time. He bought his house, which he shares with his son Connor (Lomax) and mother Lynn (Laura Dern), in 2006 when new mortgage loans were all too easy to obtain. Despite some pleas to the judge, he's given thirty days to appeal or else that's it... and yet, the next day, he's already being evicted, with a man named Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), representing a real estate agency and yet spends most of his time (pretty much all of it) evicting people from their homes.

The scene where Dennis and his family are being evicted is among the most powerful in modern cinema, certainly that I've seen in a long time. You're given the stakes that are already there, and harshest part for the characters is that the cops forcing them out (and Rick, of course) have been through this so many times that it's routine - not that the emotions don't run any less high, or the orders given with any less force. Garfield and Dern play this with just the right pitch of WTF's Going on. Meanwhile, Shannon prowls around, with his E-cigarette, giving just the barest minimum of sympathy. If that - after all, he's got other evictions to get to. This latter part is seen in the opening shot of the film, which tracks from a man who has shot himself in the house he's being evicted from, to Shannon as he walks out and explains things with terse language to a cop (how he gets away with it... well, it IS Michael Shannon, just look at him), and goes on to his next house-task.

What happens next takes the story into its central conflict: Dennis needs money to get a house (Not so oddly enough he and his family go to a nearby motel - where many others who have been evicted in the city stay while they figure things out, sometimes for years, and why they're all there, who knows, but it seems to work for the purposes of the narrative.) How to do that? By chance he tags along with Rick on a quick cleaning job at a house, and something about this young man interests Carver - if he can do construction and other manual labor, he can work on the houses being foreclosed on, or that have been abandoned and so on. But the opportunity for more money makes Dennis curious, so the offer is made: do, first, those 'Cash-for-Keys' stops - where it's a simple offer on a house, take it or leave it sort of thing, to people in danger of eviction (which are, as we see in a montage, a lot) - and then the evictions themselves.

Why does Dennis do this? The goal to get back his house is something that holds him so much in a grip that it leads him to lose his path, especially in the third act as things unravel further as bigger deals start coming up for Carver (with a lot of probably illegal things but ok in the eyes of the bureocratic this-paper-can-have-a-date-changed-and-whatever sort of system). At least morally speaking, one might say he's made a Deal with the Devil, but is Carver that? In another film he'd be the dutiful pupil of, say, Alec Baldwin ala Glengarry Glen Ross (I feel like at some point he practically says to Dennis 'Hit the bricks!'). The guy who can sell you on anything is what Carver is- this despite, or actually because, of Shannon's imposing presence, with those eyes and voice on edge.

But, as Carver explains - and in one of those kinds of monologues that Shannon gets to chew on with full dramatic relish, a little scary, intimidating, but wholly fascinating and in control of a frame - it's all about the time we're living in. He used to just be a regular old broker, and then the bubble burst in a major way (ironically he says he made more during the financial crisis than during it, a claim that gets somewhat glossed over). Is he the villain? In a manner of speaking, that he sets the protagonist on a path of turmoil, for himself and his family. But he's so smart a mover-and-shaker, a no-BS kind of money-grabber, that he has a certain allure, like Denzel Washington in Training Day.

Bahrani's previous films, like Man Push Car and Chop Shop, and to a lesser extent Goodbye Solo (which is one of those unsung masterpieces of the past 10 years), he is interested deeply in what's making America, and its people, so much in a grip of suffering. A lot of it financial, and here he populates his film with people who we would see everyday. I never felt I was seeing an actor when Garfield goes up to these houses with notices and/or evictions, and people either sign or don't or, once in a while, give the threat of a gun to get him off their property. But also do the cops and the judges and other construction workers; this is a world that feels so alive and present that it's Bahrani going another step further from Chop Shop, which was all non-professionals, into another form of neo-realism with big A-list stars and addressing larger, potent but no less vital a subject such as this.

In short, this is a major work of drama, acted with fire and conviction all around (it's among Garfield's best work, and Dern's very good too though not in the film that much), which looks at a place and time that in other hands could get bogged down in preaching to the audience about a topic, but here the simple act of a character doing something they know is wrong, over and over again, is totally absorbing.