Movie review: ‘99 Homes’

Remember after the recession first hit when layoffs and evictions rained down like a spring thunderstorm?

Director Ramin Bahrani (At Any Price) ventures back under that dark cloud with the preachy but powerful 99 Homes, a sketch of lives come undone by a system they thought they could trust. While Bahrani and his co-writers approach the subject matter with all the noisy subtlety of a bar brawl, the film rises above mere polemics thanks to charged performances from Andrew Garfield and especially Michael Shannon.

It’s 2010 and the economy is still in crisis, but it’s all good to predatory Rick Carver (Shannon), an Orlando real estate broker who has grown wealthy being the banks’ henchman. He zealously evicts homeowners who have fallen behind in their payments, seizes the property, and puts them and all they own out on the street faster than you can say “subprime mortgage.”

One of the unfortunate ones is Dennis Nash (Garfield), a struggling single dad and construction worker whose employment prospects have collapsed along with the housing industry. With his mom (Laura Dern) and son (Noah Lomax) in tow, he ends up in a rundown motel populated by many others just like him, shellshocked and lost.

He can’t find work and money’s running out. Then, as luck (or plot contrivance) would have it, Dennis ends up working for Rick, first as a handyman doing his dirty work (literally cleaning up excrement left behind by an angry tenant in a foreclosed home) and then as a protege, slowly being groomed by Rick into the kind of man he once despised.

He says he’s doing it just to earn his house back from Rick and to restore his family’s shattered life. But he’s also being seduced by the money. What Rick is throwing at him is much more than he ever could have dreamed of when he was wielding a drill and hammer.

It’s an age-old story — a twisted Pygmalion with foreclosure notices — but well-told all the same. While Bahrani hints that there’s enough blame to go around in this mess — including homeowners getting themselves in over their heads or simply ignoring multiple eviction notices — there’s no doubt who has his sympathies, and it’s neither the banks nor the government.

The eviction scenes — of the laid-off, the elderly, the mom with a babe in arms, the renter with no idea the landlord was in arrears — are heart-wrenching. They are told they have two minutes to gather their valuables and get out. Their furniture, along with all the memories they represent, are set on the lawn while the neighbors watch silently, knowing that they easily could be next.

Shannon plays the rapacious, vicious shark with a cruel glee, but he lets just enough humanity show through so that Rick isn’t totally a caricature. Meanwhile, Garfield gives the kind of layered, subtle performance that’s never called for in his more famous turn as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man.

99 Homes might have been a better movie with less of a heavy hand, especially in its climax. But this economic horror story proves one thing: a house being possessed by the supernatural as in Poltergeist is scary; a house being repossessed by the likes of Rick Carver is scarier.

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘99 Homes’."