Amazing Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) needs a new home after he and his spider-kin have been foreclosed upon. Attempting to plea bargain with an evicting police officer has to be among the most depressing things ever. You’d sooner make a deal to get gravity to stop working for a day. And whom do you root for here? I don’t want to see anybody evicted, but the officer is just doing his job … his crappy, crappy, crappy job. And I worked in mortgage lending; if people don’t pay, there ought to be a way to make them leave. OTOH, the reason people didn’t pay during the housing crisis of the Bush years had a lot less to do with deadbeats and a lot more to do with the kind of people who kick them out of homes.
99 Homes is another of those stories you wonder if somebody wrote from a grudge. Fictional or no, this film is 100% inspired by real events: real poor people who got in over their heads and real rich people who made sure it happened. This film has no sympathy for the latter.
Meet Satan, er, I mean Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate guy who turns over properties for a living. He feeds off foreclosures like fungus feeds off rot. He feels nothing. No, wait, let me correct that – he feels frustration, anger and joy, but only with respect to the success or failure of his investments. He brings a gun to every eviction. People tend to get touchy when you kick them out of homes. Go figure.
Following his eviction, single father Dennis (Garfield) moves his son and mother to the Delusionment Grove Motel. I have no idea what the real name is; it’s just replete with people who said to themselves, “this is only temporary.” Dennis is an out-of-construction worker and when he realizes some of his tools have been lifted (by Carver’s crew?), he goes searching for payback and lands a job cleaning backed up sewage out of somebody else’s forclosed home. Cleaning up raw sewage is shitty work. But Dennis’ desperation catches Satan’s eye – could this be the chosen one? The one of whom the prophecy foretells? The desperate soul who will do all my sycophantic bidding? The “man” who is willing to sacrifice any ounce of integrity or goodness in order to provide a reasonable shelter for his son?
Spooky doesn’t quite do justice to the Dennis Nash transformation. Sure, I suppose 
he doesn’t drift around blithely humming ♪99 foreclosed on homes♫ in a German accent, but he proves so easy to manipulate – hey, the banks screwed you? That means the government screwed you! Go steal it back. Not only is he foreclosing the exact same way he had been foreclosed upon weeks earlier, he’s actually making a buck off illegal methods in the process – ex. The government offers “cash for keys” for foreclosed homes. It’s $3,500 for you to leave early without a fuss; it’s in everybody’s best interests for this to happen, but one can imagine it’s hard to coerce people out of the places where they live. So Dennis gets his friends to identify foreclosed properties that have been pre-abandoned, then the Dennis-friend pretends as if Dennis-friend is the homeowner being foreclosed on and signs the “cash for keys” deal to collect the money … and doncha know it? Dennis is getting a piece, too, telling his Dennis-friends the government gives $2,500. Hmmmm.
Before long, Dennis is bringing a handgun to evictions as well. 99 Homes is a sad snowballing of evil: Man gets evicted. Evictee becomes evictor. Evictor gets greedy and loses sight of exactly where he was not long ago. Unhappiness follows. Despair follows. Violence follows. It Follows. Well, no it doesn’t, actually. 99 Homes is a pretty good condemnation of the deregulation which made most of the evil possible. Now if only there were somebody to pay for the crimes. Somebody who wasn’t just another cameraman with a grudge.
♪Father doesn’t own a suit
He’s just been given the boot
Both kid and mom are in the street
He got in a bit too deep
Cops have got a date to keep
They can’t hang around
Our house, grab your stuff and do not pout
Our house, got two minutes to get out
Our stuff is in the yard
Crew is pilfering at will
Next week will be so hard
Our house it has a crowd
Neighbors standing all around
The auction is quite loud♫
Rated R, 112 Minutes
D: Ramin Bahrani
W: Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi & Bahareh Azimi
Genre: Soul-selling
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The foreclosed upon
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Mortgage lenders
♪ Parody inspired by “Our House”
