99 Homes

Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes follows unemployed construction worker Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) who loses his family home to a slick predatory real estate broker named Rick Carver (Michael Shannon). Faced with no other way to support his mother and son, Nash must decide whether to accept Carver’s offer of a job conducting the very same type of heartless evictions he experienced.  The premise creates a fantastic moral dilemma, and Garfield, Shannon, and Bahrani are up to the challenge.  Bahrani has recently strayed from the type of micro-neorealist movies he made his name with (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo) and embraced more traditional indie fare with name actors and small budgets.  While 99 Homes is a more conventional film than I would expect from this writer/director, his skill with experienced actors is every bit as deft as it was with the amateurs of his earlier work.

Garfield finds levels of strength and vulnerability unexplored in his previous performances, and the always-riveting Shannon creates a dynamic capitalist villain who is one hundred times more credible than Michael Douglass’ fabled Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone’s simplistic Wall Street films. Shannon gets to deliver some powerful speeches that might ring a bit contrived in the hands of a lesser actor; here they play as great movie dialogue. The fact that many of the monologues and heated exchanges that permeate the film are unabashed “movie dialogue” might disappoint those who relish the purity and realism of Bahrani’s earlier writing, but for movie lovers who crave memorable, multidimensional, non-cartoon, yet bigger-then-life villains, Shannon’s Rick Carver is a revelation.

A sizable logic hole in one of the film’s key turning points and a few other minor missteps keep the picture from achieving greatness. But 99 Homes features dozens of substantive, emotionally powerful scenes that should move any viewer to feel and think. It’s an important and timely film.