99 Homes was a movie I was confident I was going to love. I was wrong. It was good, but not great. It had unavoidable flaws. Even with the most accomplished director, I don’t think it could have avoided some of its pitfalls and still fit in a two-hour time frame. Just like an unusually high number of films that I’ve seen this year, I knew very little about this movie going in. My knowledge of the film was reduced to knowing that it starred Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Social Network) and Michael Shannon (Take Shelter, The Harvest), that it was a heavy R-rated drama based on home foreclosures, and that it was scoring a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes at its time of release. I hadn’t seen a single preview of the movie, but what I did know about it was enough for me to see this movie. There was a 100% chance I would see this movie in the theater. While I think this is a pretty good movie, it does not need a theater viewing. It’s not going to win any awards. If you get a chance to see it on Netflix or cable, give it a shot. You may not love it, but I think it’ll grab your attention. While it is predictable and gets in its own way, it is a tense and engrossing film. Furthermore, it continues to showcase Shannon’s dominating screen presence. Love him or hate him, he creates memorable characters.
The movie revolves around the housing crash between 2007-2009. The setting is Orlando, Florida, where over 120,000 homes had been sold in foreclosures or short sales since 2007. The plot involves unemployed and underwater hardworking Americans are losing their homes left and right. Trying to stay one step ahead in the game proves impossible as banks are telling individuals and families two different things simultaneously. Many banks were hoping for trial mortgage modifications while simultaneously pushing through foreclosure proceedings. This put many, including Dennis Nash (Garfield), in a lose-lose situation. A construction worker by trade, we learn in the film’s early minutes that he has been on a team building a new home for the past two weeks for free because the builder defaulted on the loan. Because of this, all of the construction on the house had come to a halt, and all 10+ construction workers were sent home penniless. With no job and bills piling up, Nash’s chief concern is saving the family home that he shares with his mother Lynn (Laura Dern – Wild, Rambling Rose) and his son Connor (Noah Lomax – Safe Haven, Playing For Keeps)
Rick Carver (Shannon) is a deplorable real estate agent who preys on those who cannot make their mortgage payments. He is a cutthroat, heartless shark who acts in unethical and illegal ways. He says multiple times not to fall in love with a home. Unfortunately, it’s much easier for the man living in a small mansion to say than it is for the people who have put their life savings into their property. Armed with his own gun and escorted by two local police officers, Carver shows up at homes the day after a judge rules favor the bank over the defendant. He tells whoever is on the other side of that front door that their home is now the government’s property, and the homeowners are now trespassing. Carver is emotionless as helpless people beg to keep their homes. Instead, he gives them two minutes and then has a crew of blue-collar yes-men gut the house and put everything that isn’t rooted to the ground out on the front lawn. Not only is it a callous move, but it’s also an embarrassing one for the evicted as neighbors look on.
***Start of Spoilers***
One of those who Rick evicts is Dennis. Dennis is just another number to Rick; only he isn’t. When Dennis shows up on-site the day after his eviction accusing Rick’s crew of stealing his tools, Rick sees the desperation in the man and offers him a couple of hundred bucks to clean up the backlog of raw sewage that was the result of the recently evicted deliberately clogging up the pipes and forcing them to overflow after they had left the premise. Long story short is Rick likes what he sees in Dennis. He knows that the man is more ethically conscious than he is but is willing to check his morals at the door because a paycheck is more important than doing the right thing. Rick, filled with nothing but greed, has more foreclosures than he can deal with, and he needs someone who can do the same thing that he can. With each day comes something new and sleazy. This includes raiding foreclosed houses of their air conditioning units and refrigerators and then selling them on the open market while charging Fannie Mae to pay for replacements. This includes forging court documents and using law enforcement and court employees to illegally slide these forged documents into folders, ruining the defendant’s chances of keeping their homes. Rick has no conscience. He is married, but he also has at least one lover at a lakefront property.
People will go to great lengths to keep their homes and can resort to desperate measures when they are about to lose them, especially when they feel that they are losing them unjustly. This is why Rick holsters a gun down by his ankle and encourages Dennis to do the same. The reactions of those losing their homes are pretty realistic, as is Dennis’s response to his newly found wealth and doing the best job he can to justify an end to his means. As a lot of us would be, he’s an entirely different person when he doesn’t have money issues to worry about as when he did. While I think a large percentage of us would be, I didn’t like Dennis’s path to his new riches. I will touch on this in the next paragraph.
***End of Spoilers***
Likewise, a real estate agent like Rick Carver showing up at the doorsteps the day after a judge rules for eviction and giving the owners 2 minutes to get their belongings didn’t happen. It doesn’t take a genius to know that foreclosure cases would get bogged down in the courts for months upon months, if not years. Likewise, when the sheriff’s department distributes these eviction notices, they will give the owners at least a day to get their belongings in order. Certainly, that is not as exciting as forcing this to happen in two minutes. Still, it’s pretty irresponsible to make up facts when trying to portray a movie as realistic as possible.
Overall, this is a pretty decent movie, and I’d recommend watching it at home, but not in the theater.
Plot 8/10
Character Development 6/10 (Shannon’s character didn’t need much development, but Garfield’s did. His transformation from innocent construction worker/handyman to Shannon’s prodigy wasn’t believable…especially considering that the length of this film spanned just a couple of months. While I understand that people do desperate things in desperate situations, it’s hard to change entirely who you are in a short period…likewise, if something isn’t in your personality at all, I don’t know if you can be the opposite of that to the extreme that Bahrani tried to do with Garfield)
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 8/10 (Shannon at the top of his game…Garfield holds his own…an actress of Dern’s caliber wasn’t needed)
Screenplay 8/10
Directing 7.5/10 (some pitfalls that even the best actors probably couldn’t have avoided)
Cinematography 7/10 (it wasn’t the most beautifully filmed movie)
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 9/10 (you’ll be hooked within the first 30 seconds)
Universal Relevance 8/10 (while the overall plot seems realistic, I think that this movie took this to the extreme to really build the drama)
77%
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- The Company Men
- Wall Street
- Margin Call
- Take Shelter
- The Social Network