99 HOMES EXPOSES THE FORECLOSURE RACKET
After the housing bubble burst in 2007, followed by increased unemployment, thousands of persons were unable to pay their mortgages, whereupon banks went to court and obtained orders to foreclose homeowners. In 99 Homes, unemployed Dennis Nash (played by Andrew Garfield) is foreclosed from his home near Orlando. Soon, he pursues those working for realtor Rick Carver (Michael Shannon again!) to retrieve the tools of his trade as building contractor, tools stolen from his home during the eviction of his possessions to the lawn of the house. Carver, however, finds him particularly well qualified to fix up foreclosed homes in Orange County, Florida, after they have been stripped bare for resale. Accordingly, Carver offers him an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” job. The joy of making money then seduces Nash into rising to become Carver’s junior partner with a task of serving foreclosure notices. In some cases, he offers “cash for keys” to get those foreclosed to leave their homes peacefully, but in other cases homes owned by the bank require police to force families out of their residences. Nash has to pack a gun just in case. At one point, he is able to sell his former home and buy a mansion, but his wife Lynn (Laura Dern) objects so strongly to this sellout that she takes their son to live with her mother in Tampa. When Carver is assigned to take a forged document to court in order to assist in yet another foreclosure, he has second thoughts about his decision to join the enemy, resulting in a climax that is quite ambiguous. Director Ramin Bahrani succeeds in revealing the foreclosure business as a scam, but he fails to give filmviewers a sense of hope for a more just alternative: He does not mention that the entire caper could never have happened in the Aloha State, where the law at the height of the foreclosure crisis required referring all foreclosure petitions to court-appointed mediators, who could then check out on the authenticity of the documents and work out solutions that would avoid foreclosure between banks and homeowners. Had such a title been run at the end of the film, audiences could have left with a sense of hope. Better still, the true story of how that law was passed would have been far more dramatic than the tale of fictional characters Carver and Nash. MH