99 Homes was a movie I was confident I would love. I was wrong. It was good, but not great. It had unavoidable flaws. Even with the most accomplished director, it couldn’t 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 it. There was a 100% chance I would see this movie in the theater. While this is a pretty good movie, it doesn’t require 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 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 and 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 financially struggling Americans who are losing their homes at an alarming rate. 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 in favor of 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, removing everything that isn’t rooted to the ground and placing it 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 whom 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 premises. Long story short, Rick likes what he sees in Dennis. He knows that the man is more ethically conscious than he is, but is willing to set aside his morals because a paycheck is more important than doing the right thing. Rick, driven by nothing but greed, has more foreclosures than he can handle, and he needs someone who can do the same thing he can. With each day comes something new and sleazy. This includes raiding foreclosed houses for their air conditioning units and refrigerators, and then selling them on the open market while charging Fannie Mae to cover the cost of replacements. This includes forging court documents and using law enforcement and court employees to illegally insert these forged documents into folders, thereby compromising the defendant’s chances of retaining 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 may resort to desperate measures when they are on the verge of losing them, especially when they feel that they are being unjustly evicted. 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 newfound wealth and his best efforts to justify the end of 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 he did. While a large percentage of us would, I didn’t like Dennis’s path to his new wealth. I will touch on this in the following paragraph.
***End of Spoilers***
Some parts were great, while others needed vast improvement. The acting was excellent. Shannon is as good as he’s ever been, and he has been great in previous roles. My favorite performance by Shannon is in Take Shelter, where he plays a character in the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia. But Garfield also holds his own. While many only recognize him for being Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, Garfield is more than a superhero. And while the development of his character was unbelievable, it doesn’t take away from his performance. I couldn’t believe the change in Nash from the start of the movie to the end, given the film’s short duration from its first scene to its last. That character development just wasn’t there for me, and it was something I couldn’t get around. You can’t just change who you are (especially your moral compass) overnight. However, director Ramin Bahrani (Life Itself) either believes that you can or wants us to suspend that belief for the betterment of the movie. It wouldn’t have worked for Roger Ebert, and it didn’t work for me either.
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 only two minutes to gather 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 one day to gather their belongings and vacate the premises. Indeed, that is not as exciting as forcing this to happen in two minutes. Still, it’s somewhat irresponsible to fabricate facts when trying to portray a movie as realistically as possible.
Overall, this is a decent movie, and I’d recommend watching it at home, rather than 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’m not sure 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%
C+
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- The Company Men
- Wall Street
- Margin Call
- Take Shelter
- The Social Network