The movie “99 Homes” explores what happens when a good man tries to become successful by emulating the man who crushed him. Ray Bechard reviews the movie and explores the themes behind it.
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Some men are very good at being assholes. They make it look so easy. They get rich. They get powerful. They get women. It’s easy to understand why good men, inspired by assholes, often try it for themselves.
Turns out, good men are really bad at being assholes.
Take Dennis Nash for instance. Dennis is having a very bad day. In the opening scenes of Director Ramin Bahrani’s devastating new film, “99 Homes,” we are thrown into the pool of growing panic experienced by this uber-competent construction worker who is about to lose the small home he shares with his mother and young son in Central Florida. After begging the bank for more time to catch up on his mortgage, the 2008 financial/housing crisis comes knocking at Dennis’s door. The man doing the knocking is the aptly named Rick Carver, a gun toting real estate vulture who can’t scoop up foreclosed houses fast enough, swiftly separating families from their homes without mercy.
With paperwork and the sheriff to back him up, Rick Carver—portrayed by the ultra-menacing Michael Shannon (World Trade Center, Man of Steel, Boardwalk Empire)—puts Dennis, his family and all the belongings they “can grab in five minutes” quite literally out on the street. With his neighbors looking on, a shamed, pathetic Dennis begins his descent into survival mode.
After settling his stunned mother and son into the type of motel no one ever chooses to stay in, Dennis makes a desperate decision to sleep with the enemy. Portrayed by Andrew Garfield, (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Social Network), Dennis Nash, again quite literally, steps in shit to impress his way into getting a job working for Rick Carver, the very man who evicted him.
Carver takes on the broken Nash as his all too corruptible protégé and soon the two are in a helicopter surveying Florida’s Real Estate Killing Fields, searching for new victims.
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At its core, “99 Homes” is the story of men behaving badly. One motivated by opportunistic greed, the other by shame and loss. As Nash and Carver begin their very unequal partnership, we witness the quickening pace of their giddy, unified malice. Larceny, forgery, corruption, conspiracy – all the same destructive forces that created the Great Recession – are embraced by these two men as they race ahead, taking advantage of every parcel and person washed ashore from the economic tsunami.
As Carver explains to his eager protégé, “Don’t get emotional about real estate.” These houses, he tells him, are “just boxes” where people stay and put their stuff. They can be emptied and filled just like any other container.
When I first saw “99 Homes” at its Sundance premiere last January, I came to realize this was the story of two survivalists. One urgently trying to save his family by any means necessary and the other a predator, orchestrating a cold strategy with the eager cooperation of bankers, judges, court clerks and cops.
Pure economic Darwinism drives Carver’s survivalist instinct. Nothing he says about the bursting of the housing bubble is incorrect. Just a few years ago Americans were financially “underwater,” trapped in complicated loans seemingly designed to fail. And while Nash begins as a victim, a loser cast aside by a culture in blind pursuit of wealth and vanity, he all too easily allows himself to see the “wisdom” and rewards of Carver’s philosophy that compassion is for the weak. One man’s loss is another’s gain. Tough luck, sucker. Go join the ranks of poor and penniless. No one forced you to take out a loan.
Nash justifies his new job—HE is now evicting people for Carver—because of his need for money, and security. But he wants more. He’s seen the good life Carver has stolen for himself and covets that same level of perceived dignity and status. Each day brings a new moral conundrum in the form of questionable tasks Carver gives him—and some of which he comes up with on his own. And each time he takes the low road while keeping his new job and employer a secret from his little family.
There’s just one problem: Unlike his boss, Dennis Nash is not an asshole. He’s a decent man forced into a dark corner, surrounded by assholes offering a way out. So he takes it.
But that path doesn’t work for good men. Economic injury and injustice don’t allow ethical shortcuts for men of good conscious and character. Through Nash’s moral decay, we see the terrible price you pay for doing “whatever it takes” for your family. Nash’s price is the very family he is trying to save.
The genius of “99 Homes” is the “What would I do in his shoes?” scenario it asks us. “Would I be the asshole or the good man?” In the end, the inevitable consequences of honestly answering that question are what define us.
Michael Shannon and Raymond Bechard