99 Houses

Director Rahmen Bahrani 2014 movie, 99 Houses, is dedicated to the late, lamented Roger Ebert.  The indefatigable critic and "good soldier" of the cinema as he was called by Werner Herzog championed Bahrani's early films, stylish and open-ended exercises in neo-realism.  Although this movie is set in Orlando (or some similarly loathsome part of Florida), 99 Houses is very much a Chicago film and, so, the homage to Roger Ebert, who was based in the Windy City, seems apt.  Bahrani's movie features Michael Shannon, a Chicago actor par excellence, playing a part written in the tough-guy demotic verse associated with David Mamet -- another fixture of the Chicago scene.  Furthermore, the film's plot about corruption in the real estate foreclosure business has the reek of dirty money and crooked dealing that characterizes many productions set in Chicago and its environs. 

Bahrani's characteristic technique is to study some segment of an industry, expose its rottenness or oppression, and, then, place his actors in opposition, however reluctant, to those crooked practices.  His films are half-anthropology and half-morality play.  (Man Push Cart explores the lives of Manhattan street vendors; Chop Shop involves the auto repair and metal salvage industry; At any Price is about farming -- Goodbye Solo involves an immigrant taxi driver and is a noble variant on Abbas Kiastoami's Taste of Cherry; Bahrini also made the superb short, Plastic Bag featuring narration by Werner Herzog and music by Sigur Ros.)   In 99 Houses, a naïve young man protests the foreclosure of his family home -- he lives there with his mother played by Laura Dern and his elementary school age son.  The system is wholly rigged and the young man named Dennis Nash is evicted from the house by the demonic Richard Carver, a realtor who has made a fortune in the murkier byways of the real estate foreclosure crisis.  Carver is played with savagery and zest by Michael Shannon.  Through some plot sleight-of-hand, Nash ends up working with Carver and quickly distinguishes himself by his intelligence, aggressive attitude, and willingness to engage in illegal practices.  Nash becomes Carver's lieutenant, thus, setting the stage for the inevitable moral crisis -- will Nash continue to enrich himself from Carver's corrupt practices or will he betray his boss and return to the path of righteousness and justice?  99 Houses is genuinely fascinating and Shannon gives an impressive performance as a working class thug who has acquired a patina of high society glamor due to his money.  Nash's temptation is rendered realistically -- I think most viewers faced with the choices that Nash confronts would be similarly corrupted.  I put the film on at 9:00 pm on a weekday, expecting that it would be punishing, and that I would  have to watch the show in two installments.  In fact, the movie is very compelling, nicely, if schematically, scripted, and the characters are vivid.  In fact, if anything, the film feels a little too short and too highly compressed -- although it doesn't really matter, some of Carver's nefarious schemes aren't too clear to the viewer.  (Carver seems to specialize in stripping the foreclosed properties of their air-conditioner units and, in the more lavish houses, their swimming pool pumps.  He warehouses the stolen appliances and, then, sells them back to the government agencies involved in the foreclosures.  But there are other species of illegality on display as well -- one plot point turns on forging documents to place in files so that foreclosures that would be otherwise delayed can be implemented.)  The film is single-minded in its depiction of the milieu and the crowd of people at the margins of Carver's endeavor are interestingly and effectively portrayed -- the corruption is wide-ranging and involves nasty factotums with shovels and bolt-cutters, dirty-money sheriffs and cops, and a variety of dead-beats many of whom deserve the miserable fate that Carver metes out to them.  The threat of violence is just below the surface -- everyone is armed in case the evicted folks start shooting back and the movie begins with the aftermath of a bloody suicide.  There is some memorable dialogue in the film:  "America doesn't bail out losers.  America bails out its winner..." and "Don't get emotional about real estate.  They're boxes, big boxes, small boxes, but just boxes."  This is an extremely interesting little film that packs a significant punch.