99 Homes

Wouldn’t it be swell if all the people the sheriff’s office has to evict were deadbeat scumbags who never intended to make house payments, or were cooking meth in the garage? People who you would be happy to see their miserable possessions—favorite bong, extra T-shirt, motorcycle parts, filthy mattress—stacked at the curb. Unfortunately, getting behind on your payments happens to decent people who are just having a streak of bad luck, too, especially in 2008 and onward, as a result of the George W. Bush Great Recession, the collapse of the housing market, and the bank bailouts. Most of the big players came out richer than they went in, and no one went to jail.

This movie is about the real human cost of the perfectly legal but morally putrid wave of evictions that happened in Orlando (and all over the country as well) when people lost their jobs in the recession, or suddenly found out they were “underwater,” living in a house that was worth less than what they still owed on it. We see them slowly understand the depth of their trouble, and reluctantly realize that once the sheriff shows up at your door, it’s too late. You and all your stuff will be on the street in half an hour, tops. You have two minutes to grab what you can carry. But we have a thirty-day appeal! And if you win it, you can come back. Right now, get your ass out of the house. But I have to call my lawyer. Go ahead, but he will tell you you have to leave. But my family has lived here for three generations! Sorry, that’s not even worth a rebuttal. Get moving.

We see all that, and more, as Dennis (Andrew Garfield) and his mother (Laura Dern) and young son are evicted. Present with the sheriffs is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate agent who works with the banks and is making a terrific living as a bottom feeder. What he is doing is perfectly legal, though extremely distasteful … at first. But Carver is the sort who is never satisfied with just enough. He wants more. So he has a scam involving taking air conditioners and major appliances out of foreclosed homes and selling them back to the government. In other words, to you and me, folks. With tens if not hundreds of thousands of homes being foreclosed on, the chances of anyone noticing this approach zero.

Dennis hooks up with Carver, and soon is making a lot of money doing the same sort of thing. Carver is training him to be as big a scumbag as he is, and Dennis, understandably, at first convinces himself that it’s all okay, and he gets good at it. But you know that deep down he despises himself, since he never tells his mother and son what he’s doing.

This is a very hard film to watch, if you have any empathy for those who are at the end of their rope. And yes, I know, a lot of these people never should have gotten a loan from the bank in the first place. Yes, they should have read the fine print. Yes, they should have known that they can’t afford a $150,000 home on $35,000 a year. But the banks sold these crap mortgages very hard, and they knew exactly what they were doing. But they never expected the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. And why should they care? They knew they were “too big to fail,” and that you and I would cover their losses. And fuck the little guy who got squeezed.