Review: ’99 Homes’ Is The Subprime Mortgage Crisis Thriller You Didn’t Know You Needed

Every now and then I like to fantasise wildly about being able to afford to buy my own home. Sometimes I even idly window-shop on property sale websites. That’s how I ruined a recent Sunday afternoon by discovering a Melbourne CBD studio apartment that was advertised as a: “CA$H MACHINE FOR SALE WITH A 10% RETURN AND NEVER RUNS OUT OF CASH!!”

I was gobsmacked by the gleeful tone of the listing, which addressed prospective owners not as future residents but as ruthless capitalists only interested in property for the money they could extract from it.

So, I was appropriately primed to respond well to Ramin Bahrani’s mortgage-foreclosure polemic 99 Homes. Although, really, we’ve all been primed for a while now – subprimed, even – to get angry about the property market.

While it’s filmed in a loose, impressionistic way that suggests an indie drama, 99 Homes is what I’ve previously called a ‘business milquetoast thriller’. This is a story of a talented but naïve young man (it’s almost always a dude; The Devil Wears Prada is a rare female business milquetoast story) who falls under the spell of a ruthless, charismatic industry mentor and finds himself at a moral crossroads.

But what separates 99 Homes from most business milquetoast thrillers is its incendiary social conscience. The business milquetoast genre assumes that the government, finance, legal and tech sectors are morally neutral: capable of doing good if good people run them. But 99 Homes presents the American property industry – nay, the whole damn country – as hopelessly fucked.

As amoral real estate broker Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) explains to his protégé, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield): “America was built by rigging a nation of the winners, by the winners, for the winners.”

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Mashing Up The ‘Social Problem Film’

Because of its overlap with journalism, documentary tends to be the most overtly political cinematic form, as well as a site of formal innovation (case in point: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and forthcoming The Look of Silence).

However, narrative cinema also has a long history of depicting social injustice in genres ranging from the melodrama to the legal procedural. ‘Social problem films’ range from the right-on, Oscar-friendly fare of Freeheld (2015) and Suffragette (2015), to the harrowing arthouse visions of Wendy and Lucy (2008), Leviathan (2014) and Fantasia (2014).

All morality plays are corny, more or less. We tolerate didacticism much more in documentary because of its reality conceit; fictional parables can seem like pantomimish finger-wagging. And 99 Homes unambiguously stakes out its moral ground early, in order to deliberately muddy it later on.

In Orlando, Florida, at the height of the GFC, young tradie and single dad Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) and his good-hearted hairdresser mom (Laura Dern) have defaulted on their mortgage. Early in the film, in a truly upsetting observational sequence, a courteous but implacable agent for the bank, Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), shows up with the cops to evict the Nashes from their suburban home.

Turfed onto the street with all his belongings, and forced to move his family into a motel, Dennis realises Carver’s removalists have nicked his tools. When he shows up angrily at Carver’s HQ, Carver gives him $50 to do a menial job. Realising Dennis is skilled, motivated and good with people, Carver puts him on the payroll, grooming Dennis to be his assistant.

By this point, we get that Dennis is good and Carver evil. We’ve seen hardworking Dennis lose his home-construction gig, and beg a judge for more time to pay his mortgage. We’ve also seen the casual luxury and infidelity Carver enjoys, as well as his unemotional reaction at a previous eviction, which the homeowner blows his brains out to avoid.

The business milquetoast thriller genre sustains the American belief in virtuous capitalism, flattering us that moral, hardscrabble individuals such as Dennis can triumph over the privilege and corruption represented here by Carver. In one way, I yearned to see Dennis prosper and work towards getting his home back, and it’s wonderful to watch Carver recognise and reward his skills.

But 99 Homes uses this genre as a Trojan horse to make plain what we don’t like to admit: that capitalism is inherently unscrupulous. It’s a weapon wielded by the powerful against humble people who honestly abide by social contracts – represented quite literally here by mortgage contracts. Dennis reluctantly begins the callous work of evicting others, ignoring the job’s increasing legal dubiousness, in the hope of earning enough money to reclaim his home. But there’s no triumphant ending, no reward for Dennis in deciding to do the right thing. The struggle continues.

The Emotions of Home Ownership

In 99 Homes, Garfield plays the same kind of innocent he played in Julian Jarrold’s telemovie Red Riding 1974 (2009): a striver who’s horrified to discover his own potential for evil. Having established him as morally pure, the film immerses him in shit – literally, as his first job for Carver is to clean a house flooded with excrement by the vengeful evictees.

The physically imposing Shannon contrasts strikingly with the boyish Garfield. But Carver is a more complex character than just a greedy capitalist. He’s a pragmatist who, seeing the system was fucked, decided to fuck with it. “Don’t get emotional about real estate,” he warns Dennis.

Bahrani suggests that this may be sensible, but it’s also pathological. ‘Getting emotional’ – fighting back, as Dennis’ fellow mortgage defaulter Frank Green (Tim Guinee) does – is presented as normal and healthy; and as Dennis goes further and further along Carver’s path, he’s presented as a sick person.

The film’s title is wonderfully redolent – not just of the 99%, and of Frank Green being the one mortgagee in a hundred who decides to fight his foreclosure – but of what’s really being lost: the human emotions associated with homes.

Property developers and real estate agents don’t really sell the land or the buildings, but ideas of security, sanctuary and belonging. And part of the film’s polemic is to show that while capitalism offers us these ideas, we never really own them. “You can’t kick us out!” protests just about everyone that Carver and Dennis evicts. “This is our home!” Oh, no it’s not.

“Only one in a hundred’s gonna get on that ark, son,” Carver tells Dennis. “Every other poor soul’s gonna drown.”

This moment recalls the character Shannon played in Jeff Nichols’ 2011 film Take Shelter, who has visions (or premonitions?) of a coming apocalypse and sets out to build a shelter for his family. Take Shelter was also a film about American masculinity in a state of cascading economic, psychological and moral crisis.

Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike (2012) – also set in Florida – depicted men like Dennis, whose only resource in this state of crisis is the labour of their bodies. But while Mike chooses to turn his body into an erotic spectacle, Dennis’s masculinity is invested in his ability to “put a roof over the heads” of his mother and son.

That he sells his soul in order to do it – and that this is kind of what we’ve all got to do – is a powerfully affecting modern tragedy.

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99 Homes is in cinemas now.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets from @incrediblemelk