The bank forecloses and he runs out of appeals, which heralds the arrival of Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a wealthy real estate agent who works with the banks in repossessing homes in default. Carver’s arrival on their doorstep with a police officer and a team of moving men signals that all options have been exhausted, which despite the lengthy process involved, still comes as a shock to Dennis and Lynn. Because home ownership is so intricately tied up with the American Dream, it seems all but impossible that strangers could arrive on their doorstep with a court order that they must vacate their own home within a few minutes while all of their worldly possessions are removed before their eyes and piled on the curb. Yet, that is exactly what happens—a reality as disheartening and frightening as it is abjectly humiliating since it occurs in the open in front of all their neighbors. It is literally the American Dream turned Nightmare.

Desperate to get his house back, a desire fueled by both his need to prove himself as a father and breadwinner and his attachment to the home as the place of his childhood, Dennis essentially makes a Faustian bargain by going into business with Carver, first doing repair and construction work on the homes he has repossessed, but then later by doing the very dirty work of being the face who evicts other homeowners (the dramatic structure is very similar to Oliver Stone’s Reaganite cautionary tale Wall Street, except that the young protagonist isn’t operating out of greed, but rather survival). It isn’t long before Dennis is doing the very thing to others that Carver did to him, all in the name of reclaiming his own piece of the Dream. He does this with no small amount of guilt, regret, and stricken conscience, yet his drive to repair what he sees as his own personal failure compels him to continue, even as he begins to see deeper and deeper into the empire Carver is building out of other people’s misfortune and the ethical and legal corners he is cutting with more and more audacity.

As with his Bahrani’s previous films, Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2009), 99 Homes effectively dramatizes the harsh realities of how difficult it can be to survive economically in today’s world. Co-written by Bahrani and Amir Naderi, an Iranian director who previously worked with Bahrani as a special advisor on his 2012 film At Any Price, another story about a family in financial crisis, 99 Homes uses the sobering realities of the real estate market as a kind of microcosm of contemporary capitalism as a whole, focusing on the way its flaws can swallow good people whole. It oddly reminded me of a joke in a very different film, the ’80s Tom Hanks comedy The Money Pit, in which a real estate agent says in all earnest, “The point is you get to capitalize on another human being’s misfortune. That’s the basis of real estate.” One might say the same thing about capitalism, especially in its most shark-eat-shark manifestations, where movement up the ladder fundamentally requires someone else going down the rungs to make room.

However, 99 Homes does not play as a sanctimonious lecture, but rather as a deeply felt human drama that happens to unfold against a particular economic backdrop. Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of Dennis is impressive in the way he suggests an ordinary, hardworking man’s desperation in desperate times; he hasn’t done anything wrong, but rather has the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and believing that the worst can’t possibly happen to him simply because he’s decent and hardworking. That’s a naïve ethos that Carver, played with great, subtle, steely conviction by Michael Shannon, has long since discarded in favor of the realization that his wealth and power will only come at the expense of others. Shannon, who has been giving deeply felt, extremely nuanced performances for years now (outside his cartoonish turn as Zod in Man of Steel) is stunning in the way he shades Carver’s villainy with little hints of regret. He is a shark with a blue-tipped electric cigarette clamped in his jaws, but he’s not monomaniacal; the bits of gray around his hardened edges keep the film from turning into a simple screed. Rather, he stands as one potential future that Dennis might embrace, one that we hope he will avoid lest he also lose his soul to the almighty dollar.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Broad Green Pictures