The real estate system is awful, isn’t it? Buying property based on what money you think you’ll have despite not being able to predict the future and lenders understandably not being that nice about things when you say, “Something’s changed and I can’t pay what I thought I could pay.”
It’s hard not to think about this during “99 Homes,” which could have demonized real estate mogul Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), who during the housing crisis in 2010 Orlando specializes in notifying people that they need to vacate their foreclosed homes. But director/co-writer Ramin Bahrani (“At Any Price,” “Goodbye Solo”), long interested in how people do their jobs, doesn’t write Rick as a monster, and Shannon makes the man’s realism brilliantly understandable: The situation has changed his job, and growing up with little has made him determined to excel. Besides, he’s not the one removing people from their places—he’s just representing the agencies doing the evicting. It’s increasingly morally sticky, and Shannon, without having to yell, makes Rick intense and fascinating.
He shows little sympathy (“This isn’t your house, son”) when evicting Dennis (Andrew Garfield), his mom (Laura Dern) and his son (Noah Lomax) from the home where Dennis grew up and where his mom also lives and does her business. The trio moves into a motel already packed with families who have experienced the same. And since Dennis, a versatile construction worker struggling to find work, needs money no matter how he gets it, he embraces the opportunity to work for Rick, even as Dennis, to a degree trying on the devil’s clothes, develops into a new version of the man he so recently hated.
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Bahrani underuses Dern, a factor of “99 Homes” (which sometimes recalls “Up in the Air”) fitting its characters into certain plot-driving boxes and only letting them work within highly thematic shifts between the haves and have-nots. What builds into a tense moral standoff goes a little soft in the end, and a scene in which Dennis and an acquaintance insist neither is doing what they normally do or being who they actually are feels unnaturally shoehorned in.
But Shannon and Garfield, impressively showing the fragile change in perspective of a man who’s gotten nowhere by doing the right thing, make great sparring partners even when they’re on the same team. Early in their partnership, Rick hires Dennis to help clean up an abandoned house with a sewage backup. Dennis goes in there, looks around, comes back outside and vomits. For a second, you can’t believe he’s doing this. Then you think about his situation, and you can’t believe he wouldn’t.
3 stars (out of four)
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