With the sun finally shining brightly over the Excelsior cabanas on Lido beach (and on the hordes of harried reporters rushing between screenings), the Venice festival is nearing its first weekend and gathering steam.
One of the themes that is emerging from this edition is that of moral choices, and their consequences. That is certainly the case for 99 Homes a third day entry that is set near the epicenter of the subprime crisis circa 2010. In Florida’s Orange county – ground zero for the foreclosure epidemic that followed the junk credit bubble fueled by banks and Wall Street’s junk credit frenzy – construction grunt and single father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is trying to make ends meet in the rapidly imploding tract-home business.
In fact he ends up getting it from both ends: First he’s laid off and then he loses the home he shares with son and mother (Laura Dern) to the inexorable foreclosure machine, embodied by ruthless real estate agent and house-flipper Rick Carver (Michael Shannon). In the reverse gold rush that is Florida’s housing apocalypse Carver has seized the moment to make huge profits by recycling the vast unwanted inventory amassed by the banks and Fannie Mae, and in this overheated and topsy-turvy world Nash has barely moved his family and belongings into a cramped motel room that he finds work with none other than his evictor who quickly tutors him in the unfair but inevitable ways of the real estate world, offering him out of the losing classes and into the ranks of those who help themselves i.e. the rich and powerful “that will always win”.
Shannon gives a star turn here as the self-made mogul who pontificates about the American Dream even as for most everyone else, it is collapsing in flames; he is deliciously diabolical but also too realistic and even understandable for comfort, the pact he offers is mephistophelean and needless to say as Nash will inevitably discover there is hell to pay in bad conscience.
Other films have explored the dark side of the 2008 financial meltdown, Company Men for instance with Ben Affleck as the downsized Wall Street suit and Margin Call, JC Chandor’s dissection of board room misdeeds but Homes is one of the first dramatizations to show the suburban horror of serial evictions that tore at the fabric of many American communities (and in many still does).
The scenes in which families, elderly couples and crying children are escorted, unbelieving, to the curb carrying only what they can hold as seals are affixed to their repossessed houses by sheriff’s deputies are heart wrenching.
Director Ramin Bahrani chose to personalize the drama as opposed to the sweeping metaphors of excess of say Wolf of Wall Street and veteran Amir Naderi’s screenplay hews closely to the human plight of the characters. Incidentally Naderi is no stranger to Venice having been here in 2008 with Vegas: a True Story which also dealt in the moral perils of rapidly acquired wealth.
In the press conference he struck an ultimately optimistic tone: “The financial crisis that started with housing in Florida and stretched like a web from there all over the world. Not one person involved in that went to jail. (But I believe) change is possible. That’s why we are here in Venice – one of the world centers of culture, not only cinema but art, because from a place like this maybe we can spread a web more powerful than money – because art is more powerful than money.”

Luca Celada [gallery:3408]