Ramin Bahrani (2014)
It’s good to have Andrew Garfield back after his Spider-Man exile. In 99 Homes, he plays single parent Dennis Nash, a construction worker in Orlando, Florida. A court confirms the foreclosure of the mortgage on Dennis’s house, where he lives with his mother, Lynn (Laura Dern), and his early teenage son, Connor (Noah Lomax). They are ordered off what’s no longer their property and, after fruitless negotiation with the men evicting them, grab what possessions they can fit in their car and leave. They find grotty rented accommodation, in a building full of people who’ve lost their homes for the same reason. The man supervising Dennis’s family’s eviction is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate broker who buys up properties vacated as a result of foreclosure. Carver is assisted in his heartless house clearance work by police officers and a team of workmen, and both groups address him as ‘boss’. To add insult to injury, Carver’s workmen appropriate the tools of Dennis’s trade; he goes to Carver’s business premises to insist on reclaiming them; the fuss he kicks up there catches Carver’s attention and he offers Dennis employment. Dennis initially refuses but he’s desperate to get his home back and building jobs are hard to come by in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Dennis goes to work for Carver, initially doing repairs on his recently acquired properties. In a short space of time, he’s becomes Carver’s right-hand man. Not much later, Dennis realises that Carver is not only a cold-blooded operator but an illegal one too.
His first piece of work for Carver comes about when Dennis does what none of the other workmen on the team is prepared to do. He enters a vacated house in which there’s sewage backup, holds his nose and clears the blockage, even though the stink makes him throw up. This is an obvious yet effective foreshadowing of the story that follows. The film’s moral scheme is familiar: a conscientious but cornered man, in order to achieve what he sees as right, does wrong. And Dennis Nash, in 99 Homes, must shoulder alone the ethical burden of corrupt behaviour that the director Ramin Bahrani implies is widespread in present-day America. The story is nevertheless distinctive. There have already been plenty of US movies featuring characters struggling with the aftermath of the global recession – Up in the Air, The Company Men and Blue Jasmine, to name but three. I can’t, though, bring to mind another film in which the practical consequences of the financial crisis for homeowners are the dramatic centre in the way they are here.
Ramin Bahrani conveys, in a series of eviction scenes, a powerful sense of what it must mean to lose the home you own; as Dennis Nash discovers for himself, getting to own a place different from the home you lost isn’t proper recompense. When the people the other side of the front door plead for more time, Carver, the police officers who assist with evictions and, later in the film, Dennis explain that the property is now legally owned by the bank that foreclosed on it. We see the fear and confusion of families; and, most poignantly, the shame that breadwinners, ordered to leave the premises immediately, feel in the presence of their incredulous dependants. The playing in these eviction scenes is flawlessly naturalistic: each brutal sequence is so well done that you look forward guiltily to the next one and another dramatic treat. The evictions carried out by the empathetic, morally conflicted Dennis are the most upsetting.
The screenplay, by Bahrani and Amir Naderi, relies on a couple of improbabilities. Dennis’s mother asks no questions about the work he’s doing and, while it’s believable that Carver wants to give him a chance as a repair man, it’s harder to credit that Dennis would be entrusted with the crucial role he gets in the fraudster’s financially ambitious enterprise. What is convincing, however, is that Carver is motivated to offer a hand-up to Dennis by the same anger that animates his whole life and his pathological if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them spirit; Michael Shannon gives Rick Carver the arresting combination of dead eyes and underlying urgency. Richard Brody in the New Yorker describes Carver as ‘the Devil incarnate’, who ‘gets the best lines’. I didn’t read the character so simply although Brody is right about the lines. Carver’s big denunciation of ‘the system’ – ‘America doesn’t bail out the losers. America was built by bailing out winners … by rigging a nation, of the winners, by the winners, and for the winners’ – reads like (and is) too much but Shannon delivers this tirade expertly. And Bahrani’s and Naderi’s less purple writing is often good: as when Dennis asks Carver, about the racket he’s running, ‘Is it worth it?’, and Carver replies, ‘As opposed to what?’
Dennis, after collaborating in doing bad and doing great harm to others, finally makes a very public confession – one that is cathartic both for him and for the film’s audience. This outcome, although it’s predictable, is more qualified and downbeat than finales often are in crisis of conscience parables on the screen. By this stage, Dennis is estranged from his family and he’ll now lose his freedom too but Ramin Bahrani is more ambiguous about the fate of Richard Carver. Andrew Garfield is very convincing as a decent man undone by circumstance. Pace Richard Brody again, the protagonist doesn’t quite sell his soul: he remains both likeable and ambivalent but Garfield manages to make Dennis seem gradually more diminished, hemmed in by a guilty conscience. He’s given fine support by Laura Dern, who’s especially impressive when Dennis’s funny, loving mother discovers what her son’s been up to: Lynn doesn’t say much at first but Dern’s bright eyes are suddenly metallic and the set of her sunny face hardens with them. Noah Lomax does well too as Dennis’s son – again not saying a great deal, but taking it all in. Antony Partos’s score, although sometimes superfluous, has the good taste to avoid crass underlining of the moral of Ramin Bahrani’s compelling story.
1 October 2015
