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Ramin Bahrani makes films about the American Dream as seen through the eyes of those on the margins of the increasingly unrealistic "mainstream" life: immigrants, children, transplants, or those too damaged to participate anymore (like the grizzled old dude played by Red West in " Goodbye Solo "). For the most part, these people still believe in the American Dream. They hope, strive, plan. But the system has failed them. The system is broken, and never more broken than in Bahrani's latest film, "99 Homes," starring Michael Shannon , Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern .

"Don't get emotional about real estate," warns real estate broker Rick Carver (Shannon) throughout "99 Homes," as people are forcibly evicted after defaulting on bank payments. Carver's may be practical advice, considering the economic crash and the housing crisis, but it is also heartless. Real estate to Rick Carver means money and opportunity; real estate to everyone else means "home," and what is more emotional to human beings than the concept of "home"? 

The film opens with a brutal eviction sequence, filmed in one take. Blood spatters the bathroom walls as the resident commits suicide, all as the sheriff's department swoops through the house, overseen by Rick Carver, a shark-eyed man in an ill-fitting blue suit, smoking a glowing-blue electric cigarette. The story shifts to Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a single dad living with his mother (Laura Dern) and his little boy Connor ( Noah Lomax ) in the family home. Mom works a hairdressing business out of the living room. Dennis works construction but jobs are hard to come by. Nobody's building anymore. Bills pile up. They are in danger of losing their home. Dennis goes to court to fight for more time, he tries to get a lawyer to work pro bono.

One day, the reckoning arrives. The sheriff's department shows up, led by Rick, to evict them. In a harrowing scene of mounting panic, Dennis and his mother protest as Rick drawls, both easily and with enormous aggression, "This isn't your house anymore, son." The fight that ensues is acted and filmed with almost unbearable immediacy (cinematographer Bobby Bukowski does superb work throughout). Given two minutes to vacate, the hyperventilating family pile up whatever possessions they can fit into the back of a pick-up truck, and head to a cheap motel, filled with people in the same situation. "We've been here two years now," says a woman.

Dennis will do what it takes to get his home back, including accepting a job working construction for his nemesis Rick. It's a deal with the devil, and all that that implies. Dennis gets sucked into Carver's circle of easy cash, shady deals. Within almost no time, Dennis is on the other side of those evictions, standing in the doorway, waiting for the confused angry residents to vacate. The door-to-door sequences are masterful. These people don't seem to be professional actors (although they may be), their reactions are so raw and real. The audience is placed in the uncomfortable position of voyeurs, eavesdroppers, on a human being's lowest moment. 

"99 Homes" operates like a thriller (from its stunning opening one-take sequence), with elements of melodrama to heighten the stakes. (Some of the melodramatic elements don't work as well as the rest, relying, as they do, on coincidence, racing against the clock, etc; the reality is horrifying enough.) Held together with Antony Partos and Matteo Zingales' portentous original score, thrumming underneath almost every scene, "99 Homes" represents a shift for Bahrani. His other features have been small dramas, filmed accordingly: lots of hand-held camera work and a naturalistic approach. "99 Homes" has a strong look, a bold mood, with attention-getting shots like that opener, as well as a couple of aerial shots showing homes stretched out below. From that vantage point, homes look generic. To those on the ground, of course, it's a very different story. 

Andrew Garfield, as a man who has "failed" in his duty as protector and provider, has an almost constant sense of panic throughout, catching his breath in his throat, his posture tight and alert. Tears threaten to overwhelm him, but Dennis does not have time for self-pity. Nobody does. His one goal is to get his house back, the crevasse of permanent instability opening beneath him and his family. Bahrani keeps that heat turned up in the machinations of the plot, as Carver seduces Dennis with offers of wealth (meaning, in Carver's world, self-respect). "America doesn't bail out losers," Carver tells Nash. " America bails out winners."

Michael Shannon is both ruthless and strangely tender in his seemingly irredeemable character. Carver explains his background to Dennis, his humble roots, his roofer father, his jobs in construction. Up until the crash, his job was putting people into homes. It's not his fault that his job has now become throwing people out. Any hard economic time will create a man like Rick Carver, determined to make more money off the slump than the boom. It's a very honest performance. 

Reminiscent of the films of Jafar Panahi (which also focus on those on the margins), Bahrani's films are a critique of the very concept of "mainstream." If there is to be a mainstream, then the boundaries must be more inclusive. Bahrani's films represent an urgent demand that audiences pay attention to the world and the people around them. His films insist: Look. See.  Bahrani accomplishes this not by making "message" films, but by focusing on individual characters, whether it be a Pakistani former singer who now pushes a food cart in Manhattan (" Man Push Cart ,") a little Latino boy working in an auto-body shop (" Chop Shop ,") or the optimistic Senegalese-American who drives a cab and dreams of being a flight attendant ("Goodbye Solo.") Through these characters, Bahrani critiques American life, its economics, its class divides, its assumptions and social strata. Like Panahi, he is a humanist. The dignity of the individual is all. 

"99 Homes" is a ferocious excavation of the meaning of home, the desperation attached to real estate, the pride of ownership and the stability of belonging. The pace never lets up. Once a person slips below the mainstream, it is nearly impossible to gain a foothold again. These characters struggle like hell to survive.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

99 Homes (2015)

Rated R for language including some sexual references, and a brief violent image

112 minutes

Andrew Garfield as Dennis Nash

Laura Dern as Lynn Nash

Michael Shannon as Rick Carver

Tim Guinee as Frank Green

J.D. Evermore as Mr. Tanner

Noah Lomax as Connor Nash

Clancy Brown as Mr. Freeman

Nicole Barré as Nicole Carver

Cullen Moss as Bill

Judd Lormand as Mr. Hester

• Ramin Bahrani
• Amir Naderi
• Bahareh Azimi

Director of Photography

• Bobby Bukowski

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99 Homes Reviews

Say this for 99 Homes: It contains arguably the most truthful snatch of dialogue to be found in any movie released so far in 2015.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 12, 2023

99 Homes really belongs to Shannon, offering a portrait of a man who has long since stopped asking about the ethical implications of his actions and, only after a few drinks, hints that he laments having to wear a concealed weapon.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2022

Features a gut wrenching eviction scene that establishes the tone for the rest of the film. It's the stuff they don't show you on reality flip shows, the personal, tragic side of foreclosure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 4, 2021

99 Homes is not just a well-made film, it's a film that should shake the very foundation of the subject it deals with.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2021

There are contrivances to Bahrani's plotting, but they all manage to build in a satisfactory manner. The main goal here is to watch a man become what he hates: not out of want, but out of necessity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 21, 2021

Shannon is superb at being contemptible and intense, tossing about vein-popping speeches that attempt to justify his immoral and regularly illegal approach to making money.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 4, 2020

Bahrani's most effective film to date, 99 Homes features a particularly vibrant Michael Shannon engaged in a modern perversion of American greed.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 13, 2020

Bahrani effectively and systematically portrays the awful things people will do, betraying themselves and others, faced with impossible economic conditions.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2020

The film is not a pleasant one to watch, but it is absolutely electrifying on all fronts.

Full Review | Apr 7, 2020

As comes as no surprise, writer/director Ramin Bahrani breaks down the door of our collective moral compass with this cat and mouse thriller of corruption versus conscience.

Full Review | Nov 29, 2019

It's generally positive, but it is sad that it remains just an estimable proposal when it sometimes shows that it could have been much more than that. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 19, 2019

Its great cast and effective drama, at least for the majority of the film, are undeniably compelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 24, 2019

Bahrani's vérité gets somewhat lost among his amplified quasi-thrillery plot beats, but this low-key master continues to grow with a wider scope and commanding actors. Don't miss 99 Homes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 4, 2019

While 99 Homes does suffer from some contrived plotting and character development, Bahrani has also produced a timely portrait of the human cost of the housing crisis.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 6, 2019

99 HOMES features award-worthy performances, an original premise that speaks so much truth, but contains a climax that is hard to like, leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 30, 2019

Directed and co-written by Ramin Bahrani, 99 Homes is a dreary story worth telling, unfolding through realistic, powerful acting all around.

Full Review | Jan 25, 2019

Anchored by strong work from Michael Shannon, it's a fascinating examination of the fragile nature of a home owner's market, but it also starts to run out of steam in the second half.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jan 18, 2019

As a movie with some lessons for us, 99 HOMES may not be the most transcendent, but it is practical, useful and fairly disturbing.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 7, 2018

At once realistic and fabulistic, 99 Homes is Bahrani's best film.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2018

Tight as a drum writing and terrific performances from Garfield, Shannon, plus Laura Dern as Dennis's mother, represent a solid investment of your time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

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'99 Homes': A Morality Play Built On Foreclosures And Evictions

David Edelstein

Andrew Garfield portrays Dennis Nash, a man charged with carrying out evictions, in 99 Homes . Broad Green Pictures hide caption

Andrew Garfield portrays Dennis Nash, a man charged with carrying out evictions, in 99 Homes .

The most powerful morality plays work like drama instead of melodrama, so you're not just on the side of the victim, you also see the world through the eyes of the oppressor. Wall Street did that, although Oliver Stone made the devil-mentor of the wide-eyed protagonist, Gordon Gekko, so charismatic that a generation of moneymen adopted him as a role model.

Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes works on the same principle, with one key difference. The villain is Rick Carver, a predatory Florida real estate agent played by Michael Shannon, but the guileless apprentice he corrupts begins as one of his victims.

That victim is Dennis Nash, played by Andrew Garfield. Nash is a skillful builder, but the market has fallen out of the construction business and he barely gets work. He takes out a loan he can't repay on the house in which he lives with his mom, played by Laura Dern, and his young son.

Michael Shannon (right) is a predatory Florida real estate agent who traffics in evictions in 99 Homes. Hooman Bahrani/Broad Green Pictures hide caption

Michael Shannon (right) is a predatory Florida real estate agent who traffics in evictions in 99 Homes.

Early on, he fights foreclosure before a brusque judge. Then comes a knock at the door: the sheriff and, behind him, Carver. In the scene that follows, a hand-held camera swerves with the characters as the mother cries out in grief and Nash pleads and argues. Bahrani presents this as a primal violation. Owning a home in the U.S. is hugely freighted with issues of self-worth. I found the scene so excruciating I had to get up and walk around the back of the theater.

99 Homes turns on an improbability you just have to go with: Carver takes a shine to Nash, who proves himself by taking charge of the cleanup of a house where the evicted owners deliberately backed up the septic tank. Soon, Carver's giving Nash loads of money to strip foreclosed homes of appliances and, later, carry out evictions. The carrot is that if Nash makes enough, he can buy back his home. The audience is in a tough spot, rooting for Nash to succeed and cringing as he does unto others what was done unto him.

Carver, the film's devil-mentor, is a man who has channeled his demons with startling efficiency. But 99 Homes is sometimes written with a heavy hand, and Garfield — though hardworking — overplays Nash's feelings of guilt. He doesn't want the audience to hate him, even for a moment, so when he evicts people he looks as distraught as they do. Fortunately, Dern makes Nash's mother so decent and unaffected that you understand her son's reluctance to tell her the source of his cash. You know you're damned if you can't tell your mom what you do for a living.

99 Homes builds to a predictable but smashingly effective climax. Bahrani makes you understand how this poisonous financial ecosystem thrives. His early films — among them Man Push Cart and Chop Shop — were lucid studies of people on the outside of society. Here, he shows that in an economic climate this unstable, everyone fancies himself or herself an outsider — liable to be victimized — and can justify any bad deed. Even the evictors fear they're one step away from eviction.

• Broad Green Pictures

Summary Charismatic and ruthless businessman Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), is making a killing by repossessing homes - gaming the real estate market, Wall Street banks and the US government. When he evicts Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a single father trying to care for his mother (Laura Dern) and young son (Noah Lomax), Nash becomes so desper ... Read More

Written By : Bahareh Azimi, Amir Naderi

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‘99 Homes’: a gripping drama about saving family house

Movie review of “99 Homes”: Michael Shannon, who earned an Oscar nomination for his spooky performance in “Revolutionary Road,” plays a wicked real-estate broker in this gripping drama. Rating: 3.5 stars out of 4.

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Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning 2010 documentary, “Inside Job,” did an excellent job of explaining the economic meltdown of 2008.

The human cost of that crisis is even more dramatically portrayed in Ramin Bahrani’s “99 Homes,” the fictional story of a wicked Florida real-estate broker (Michael Shannon) who manipulates a desperate construction worker (Andrew Garfield) and his mother (Laura Dern), who are on the verge of losing the family home.

Shannon, who earned an Oscar nomination for his spooky performance in “Revolutionary Road,” pulls out all the stops to play this wily predator as the ultimate huckster. Garfield (aka Spider-Man) is just as convincing as the compromised family man who will do almost anything to keep his child and mother clothed and fed.

Movie Review ★★★½  

‘99 Homes,’ with Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, Laura Dern. Directed by Ramin Bahrani, from a screenplay by Bahrani and Amir Nadari. 112 minutes. Rated R for language, including some sexual references, and a brief violent image. Several theaters.

“Inside Job” could almost be an alternative title for this gripping and timely drama, which makes none of the family’s choices look easy. Even the creepy villain has his reasons — providing you can believe his self-justifying agenda.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Great, if downbeat, indie drama deals with moral conflict.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The storyline is a spin on the Faust legend, in wh

Dennis learns a huge lesson after selling his soul

A moment of startling blood and gore -- and a bloo

Innuendo/references to sexual acts (i.e. "han

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "

Characters smoke cigarettes on a regular basis. A

Parents need to know that 99 Homes is a powerful, thought-provoking indie drama that weaves the recent financial crisis with the classic Faust legend. Expect a couple of scenes of bloody violence and gore, a dead body, and some fighting, as well as a house filled with excrement. Language is fairly strong,…

Positive Messages

The storyline is a spin on the Faust legend, in which a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for riches; he loses focus on what matters but eventually realizes that family is the most important thing. The lessons of the economic crisis that began in 2008 (and in some ways, still continues) -- i.e. banks gambling on bad mortgages and earning huge profits by foreclosing -- are part of the plot; the movie manages to address these important issues without getting preachy or overbearing

Positive Role Models

Dennis learns a huge lesson after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for riches and glory. He does things that are morally wrong but eventually sees the error of his way and risks his livelihood to try and set things right.

Violence & Scariness

A moment of startling blood and gore -- and a bloody corpse. Violent fighting. A house full of human excrement.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Innuendo/references to sexual acts (i.e. "hand job," "blow job"). Kissing random girls at a party. Scantily clad women; objectification of women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c--ksucker," "a--hole," "ass."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters smoke cigarettes on a regular basis. A character smokes a "vape" cigarette. Party with lots of drinking and some cigar smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 99 Homes is a powerful, thought-provoking indie drama that weaves the recent financial crisis with the classic Faust legend. Expect a couple of scenes of bloody violence and gore, a dead body, and some fighting, as well as a house filled with excrement. Language is fairly strong, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c--ksucker," and "a--hole." There's some sexual innuendo and passionate kissing, as well as scantily clad women and objectification of female characters. Characters smoke cigarettes regularly (one character also smokes a "vape"), and there's a scene of heavy drinking and cigar smoking at a party. Given that the film stars The Amazing Spider-Man 's Andrew Garfield , teens may be interested. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (1)
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Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

Independent contractor Dennis Nash ( Andrew Garfield ) does his best to support his mother ( Laura Dern ) and his son ( Noah Lomax ) with his increasingly intermittent income, but the day comes when the bank sends a foreclosure notice. Dennis tries to navigate the red tape and save his house, but time runs out, and slick, no-nonsense broker Rick Carver ( Michael Shannon ) shows up to kick them out. An angered Dennis later confronts Rick ... and finds himself with a job offer. As Dennis rises through the ranks of Rick's organization, he finds ways to cheat the bank, and his paychecks increase. He dreams of getting his old house back, but when he starts foreclosing on others, Dennis begins to realize that he may have compromised his soul.

Is It Any Good?

Acclaimed indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani , who regularly and bravely focuses on heartbreaking trials of life while keeping his stories rooted in humanity, turns in some of his finest work here. A drama of great power and subtlety, 99 HOMES manages to talk about one of today's most pressing and troubling issues without getting preachy or overbearing. At the same time, the movie borrows the classical structure of the Faust story while still managing to feel immediate and relevant.

Perhaps it's this merging of the classical and modern that makes the movie work so well -- or maybe it's the impressive performances. Shannon has rarely been used so well, with his sinister, snaky countenance and his weird charm crossing paths. And Garfield is both commanding and heartbreaking. Certain moments (losing the home) beautifully capture a kind of short-of-breath panic and others (earning dirty money) a kind of sickening elation, but all of it is remarkably immediate -- and remarkably human.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about 99 Homes ' violence . How do the scenes of violence work in the film? Are they an attack or a response? Are they justified? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

What is the Faust legend? What lessons are learned from it? Can you think of other movies that build on this concept?

How much does the movie explain about the financial crisis that began in 2008? What does foreclosing on people's houses have to do with it? Who gains? Why? Has anything changed?

How frequently do the characters smoke ? Does it change the way you feel about them?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 25, 2015
• On DVD or streaming : February 9, 2016
• Cast : Andrew Garfield , Michael Shannon , Laura Dern
• Director : Ramin Bahrani
• Inclusion Information : Middle Eastern/North African directors, Female actors
• Studio : Broad Green Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 112 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language including some sexual references, and a brief violent image
• Last updated : April 14, 2024

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Before it goes off the rails in the final stretch, 99 Homes is a riveting rabble-rouser that thinks it can make a difference. In these days when Hollywood typically dulls our wits, Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes has a fire in its belly. It’s spoiling to be heard.

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Michael Shannon explodes onscreen as Rick Carver, a Florida real-estate vulture who makes his living evicting families from their homes. When Rick does just that to Dennis Nash ( Andrew Garfield ), an unemployed construction worker and single dad with a preteen son (Noah Lomax) and a mother (a superb Laura Dern) in his care, Dennis wants revenge. At first. Later, he joins the bastard in capitalizing on poverty for easy profit. Maybe not so easy. Dennis still has a working conscience. But for how long?

In the script Bahrani wrote with Iranian partner Amir Naderi, the American dream has passed from nightmare to living hell. The vicious cycle can be seen on Dennis’ tortured face. This is Garfield’s best performance since The Social Network . The film asks, “Is there a bailout for moral bankruptcy?” It’s not a pretty answer.

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99 Homes Review

24 Sep 2015

112 minutes

Andrew Garfield dances with the devil in this gripping American real estate drama. He’s a construction worker and single father who loses his home after failing to keep up repayments. When the shark who bought his home (Shannon) offers him work, he can’t afford to refuse.

It’s a heart-breaking, authentic insight into the devastation caused by the 2008 housing market crash. Some plot developments are more convincing than others, but it’s still a compelling drama with an impressive turn from Garfield as well as Shannon and Dern as Garfield’s concerned mother.

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99 Homes Tidily Critiques Our Swampy Financial Ecosystem

99 Homes is the fifth and most sensational feature by Ramin Bahrani’s, a slam-bang morality play in the Wall Street mode set closer to home. Here, the embodiment of rapacious, conscienceless, deregulated capitalism is now a Florida realtor, Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), who evicts people who’ve been foreclosed on (sometimes under criminally false pretenses), using cops to pull crying, pleading, raging families out of the houses. That’s what happens to the protagonist, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a barely employed builder and single dad living with his son and mom (Laura Dern) in the house where he grew up. The scene in which Carver and his men arrive on Nash’s doorstep is so agonizingly pitched and gruelingly drawn out that I had to get up and walk in the theater. But Bahrani is pushing it in the name of realism. Owning a home in the United States is hugely freighted with emotion, with issues of real worth and imagined self-worth. He wants to invade our space.

The film turns on an improbability you just have to go with: that Carver takes a shine to Nash, who proves himself by literally shoveling shit. Really: An evicted homeowner has backed up the septic tank before departing, and Nash charges in where Carver’s regular lowlife employees won’t. This is the Wall Street (also GoodFellas ) template, in which an honest young man acquires a satanic mentor and can’t resist his newfound power. We’re complicit. After going through Nash’s eviction, we root for him to make big money and get his home back, even if it means doing unto others … Well, there’s the rub.

Bahrani’s last film, and first with stars, was At Any Price, which was better than most people said but made in the drearily realistic style of ’80s Midwest farm indies. Bahrani learned from his mistake. He opens 99 Homes with a self-consciously bravura tracking shot that starts on the feet of a man who has just blown his head off in the bathroom while his family stood by and ends with Carver barking into the phone about the next scheduled eviction.

In the best devil-mentor tradition, Carver delivers punchy, driving monologues on the subject of how his business actions make sense in the larger capitalist economy. “America doesn’t bail out losers,” he says. “America was built on bailing out winners.” He’s proud to steal from the government or its entities, like Fannie Mae. He even finds a way of yoking self-interest to Scripture, likening himself to an animal refusing to drown when Noah’s ark sails. You gotta love Shannon. He has such a twitchy, wild-man vibe that most people forget he’s a controlled (and marvelous) stage actor. His Carver is a man who — like Shannon — has channeled his demons with supernatural discipline.

One of my complaints about The Wolf of Wall Street was that Martin Scorsese kept the victims offscreen, allowing us to groove on his anti-hero’s brazenness. 99 Homes is more conscientious — and more heavy-handed, too. When Nash becomes Carver’s right hand, he evicts weeping, screaming families more in sorrow than anger, and Garfield signals his misery so madly that the film loses some dramatic tension. But Bahrani’s casting of Dern is genius. She’s such a profoundly unaffected actress that you instantly buy her aversion to her son’s lucre. She has a moral and aesthetic problem with that tacky mansion on the waterway. She wouldn’t fit in there.

Tidy and moralistic as it is, 99 Homes makes you understand why this swampy financial ecosystem thrives. Bahrani’s first films were lucid studies of people on the outside of society looking in. Now he’s able to dramatize the way everyone fancies himself or herself an outsider and — out of fear, a sense of injury, or both — can justify any kind of behavior to get inside. In this time and place, even evictors fear the knock on the door.

*This article appears in the September 21, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

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99 Homes review: Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon flog the foundations of America

Ramin Bahrani delivers a muscular, complex drama about real-estate – and false promises – in a land of dreams and bankruptcy

R amin Bahrani has established himself as a film-maker with a flair for dramatising the experiences of new immigrant communities in the United States, with excellent pictures like Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo. The same compassion is here, but the engines of drama and confrontation have been revved up an awful lot more. 99 Homes is an exciting and emotionally grandstanding drama about temptation, shame, humiliation and greed — and it’s got something to say about America’s toxic-loan slump and how the taxpayer-funded bailout created a bonanza for big businesses who could make money out of the recession.

The drama revolves around two men, a corrupter and a corruptee. Michael Shannon plays Rick Carver, a hard-faced estate agent in Orlando, Florida: the court-appointed agent for homes that have been repossessed by the bank because the wretched owners couldn’t keep up the payments. It is a very juicy earner for Carver, who stands there smirking and vaping, as — backed up by armed officers from the sheriff’s department — he supervises the process whereby the sobbing families are booted out and their possessions piled up on the sidewalk, and takes a cut from the eventual repo sale which will be at a bargain rate, but still more than the loan sum.

Everyone wins, except for the now-homeless owners, whose own faltering investment actually created this carrion opportunity and who’ve had to move their families into a scummy motel. It is a situation that routinely leads to horror, desperation and violence, with armed eviction-day standoffs, and Bahrani plunges us into a nightmarish situation from the outset, through which Carver swims as uncaringly as one of the Florida gators.

One of his victims is hardworking carpenter and builder Dennis Nash — excellently played by Andrew Garfield — a single dad living with his infant son and his mother (Laura Dern), who runs a hairdressing business in the lounge. They fall behind with the payments; Carver kicks them out and Dennis and his family endure the unthinkable calvary of shame as all their worldly goods are thrown out into the street. Desperate for work, Dennis finds that Carver himself needs a willing hand. One of his mortgage victims has carried out a scorched-earth policy: blocking the sewers so the house’s interior is literally covered in shit. Nash volunteers to clear it out for $50 — a horrible metaphor for his disgust and self-disgust — and then begins to work for Carver as a builder before graduating to doing eviction work himself. He may even get his beloved family home back, at the cost of his soul.

Bahrani sketches out a sickeningly ironic mentor relationship between the two men, and like a Vichy collaborator learning to admire the Germans, Dennis finds himself submitting to Carver’s tutelage and ideology: survival is all, making a buck is all. Houses are not family homes but boxes – assets that facilitate income streams. And he shows that Carver is not, for all his hatchet-faced protestations, simply enforcing the laws of capitalism on a level playing field — he has his snout in the public money trough. Bailout money intended to help distressed homeowners with relocation expenses is routinely stolen: Nash’s job is faking lists of bogus homeowners so he can get his hands on the cash. He also has to steal and vandalise items such as AC units so that these can be notionally repaired and replaced at the taxpayers’ expense.

It is a taut, lean drama that plays with pitiless accuracy on the horror of bankruptcy, the fear of losing everything. Bahrani cleverly points up the awful moment-by-moment details: the last, futile call to one’s useless lawyer as Carver and his men arrive, the pure bewilderment and, perhaps most painful of all, the habit of aggressively addressing everyone as “sir”. The cops will call the defaulter “sir” as he is being evicted; the defaulter himself will repeatedly address the bailiffs as “sir” with shrill and futile demands that they leave the property. Even at the nadir of despair, this pseudo-politeness is maintained.

The business relationship between Carver and Nash does not have the black comic richness of, say, Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in Training Day . It is more opaque and restrained: at least partly because Carver never really relaxes and unwinds with his hapless protege, for whom he never has anything other than contempt – and Nash is too stunned by the speed of his advancement within the very organisation that unmanned him. Bahrani does not give us scenes in which they become almost friends, and these would very probably not be convincing. The emphasis is more on the externals of the drama and the relationship Nash has with his boy and with his mum, with whom he has to share a motel room even as he is beginning to make out like a gangster. This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.

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Movies | ’99 homes’ review: real estate gets devastatingly personal.

Well before 1925, when the Marx Brothers cavorted through a story about the Florida real estate craze in “The Cocoanuts” on Broadway, the Sunshine State real estate explosion became the boom heard around the world. But explosions go both ways, semantically speaking. When a housing market “blows up,” it can mean success or failure, money or disaster. Or money made on the backs of other people’s disaster.

The storyline in the tense new drama “99 Homes,” set in 2010, wasn’t and isn’t strictly a Florida phenomenon. But the movie wouldn’t work as well situated anywhere else. Michael Shannon, probably the busiest good actor in movies today, plays Rick Carver, the master house-flipper and real estate exploiter whose money is made on bank foreclosure properties, of which there is a scary supply in the wake of the worst recession since the ’30s.

When we first see Carver, he’s in his element: inside a foreclosed house. But this home’s former owner is a bloody mess, dead in the bathroom by a self-inflicted gunshot. Berating the police, his own workers and whoever’s on the other end of the cellphone, Carver barrels through his own life, evicting this one, flipping that one. Real estate isn’t personal, he says.

One of the unlucky soon-to-be-ex-homeowners is construction worker Dennis Nash, played by Andrew Garfield, who lives with his son (Noah Lomax) and his mother (Laura Dern) in a home they’re about to lose. “99 Homes” establishes its stakes vividly and well in its opening passages. Almost immediately Nash goes to work for the very man, Carver, responsible for (or at least symbolic of) his no-win circumstance. He needs the money. Nash is a smart man, and the Faustian bargain he cuts with Carver lifts Nash’s family out of their lousy temporary housing at a motel populated largely by the evicted.

For a long time, Nash lies to his loved ones about Carver, his newfound employer/mentor/corrupter. It’s a delayed-secret film, in other words, in addition to being an angry, topical study in what it means to game a cynically unreliable system.

The movie comes from co-writer and director Ramin Bahrani, and it’s a change-up in tone and rhythm from his earlier work, a lot of which is terrific. In “Man Push Cart,” “Chop Shop” and “Goodbye Solo,” Bahrani created lovely, patient character studies grounded in concrete, shrewdly detailed sociological detail. Before “99 Homes,” Bahrani made a more conventionally plotted family-farm potboiler, “At Any Price,” with Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron. Compared with Bahrani’s earlier work, the narrative felt awkwardly developed. “99 Homes” basically works in a way that “At Any Price” didn’t quite.

There are some lurches in the final third of the film, written by Bahrani and Amir Naderi, when Nash bottoms out before his moral reckoning. It’s not a subtle film, though the reason it succeeds has everything to do with the skill and nuance the actors playing the devil and Faust bring to the project.

At this point in his career, Shannon could play a wolf such as Carver in his sleep and he’d still be effective. He takes pains, however, not to depict this hollow, e-cig-wielding destroyer of people’s souls as a subhuman character. He gets things done; he doesn’t kick the nearest dog. He’s too busy kicking the nearest human out onto the curb. Carver needs a foil, and even a bit of a conscience, and he finds both in Nash, played by Garfield as a wily, adaptable but increasingly haunted good man. The movie sometimes has the air of a thesis statement about greed and wanton economic destruction. But at its best, “99 Homes” finds Bahrani tightening the screws on his own style, going for speed, concision and an agitating rhythm where his previous films took their time. I hope he’ll go on to make movies combining the vital aspects of all his work.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune

“99 Homes” — 3 stars

MPAA rating : R (for language including some sexual references, and a brief violent image)

Running time : 1:52

Opens : Friday

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99 Homes (2014)

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'99 Homes' Is a Blood-Boiling Thriller

99 Homes centers on a greedy, heat-packing real estate broker who makes money by evicting people from their foreclosed homes.

" 99 Homes ," starring Andrew Garfield , Michael Shannon, and Laura Dern , is one thriller of a movie.

Based on true events about the home foreclosure crisis, this movie will have your blood boiling and you gripping the arm rest in anger knowing people really were losing their homes left and right -- and given only minutes to vacate them.

"99 Homes" centers on a greedy, heat-packing real estate broker (Shannon) who makes money by evicting people from their foreclosed homes. He shows up with sheriff's deputies and a lock smith, and gives people two minutes to pack up all their worldly possessions and get out. Most people are stunned and still on the phone with their lawyers or their banks, trying to modify their home loans but to no avail. One of his evicted victims, Garfield's Dennis Nash, is jobless and so desperate that he goes to work for the man who evicted him and starts making money doing the same dirty deed to others. Together they steal, pillage, and forge legal documents to make more and more money evicting hard-working people. Eventually, Garfield's conscience catches up with him.

"99 Homes" was written and directed by Ramin Bahrani , who also directed "Good Bye Solo" and "Man Push Cart." While you've likely never heard of those movies, "Homes" will have you hooked by the trailer and talking about it days after you leave the theater. In 2009, legendary film critic Rodger Ebert declared Bahrani "the new great American director," and this movie shows that he's earned that title.

Everyone should see "99 Homes," if not for the amazing filmmaking then to better learn how banks caused the housing market crash that devastated so many Americans, and the greed and profiteering that followed.

Wendell Escott is a student at El Camino Community College and a contributor to Moviefone's Campus Beat.

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"High Stakes Drama Challenges Ethics of Corporate Greed"

What You Need To Know:

(B, PaPa, ACap, LLL, VV, S, AA, D, MM) Overall moral worldview where characters are held accountable for corrupt actions, man admits that he cheated for profit and turns himself and his company over to authorities, but main characters allow selfishness and greed to replace morality, plus an anti-capitalist theme against banks who are depicted as heartless during foreclosure proceedings against homeowners; at least 84 obscenities and profanities, name-calling involving references to male genitalia, innuendo about the middle finger gesture is used, a house is shown with a septic problem, and the entire indoors is covered in human feces, and a man is shown vomiting; strong violence includes a dead man in a blood-splattered bathroom is shown with a gun beside him on the floor, a man is implied to have committed suicide, and police have a standoff and exchange gunfire with a man holed up in a house; references made to sexual acts, it’s implied man is having an affair and has a child from a one night stand is implied; no nudity; alcohol use at a party, two men get moderately drunk at a party, a man gets drunk and passes out in his house, man talks about his father passing away from alcoholism; cigarette and cigar smoking in several scenes, but no drug references; and, company uses multiple immoral business practices to steal and cheat for profit and son lies to his mother repeatedly about his job.

More Detail:

In 99 HOMES, a man ends up working for the real-estate broker who evicted him from his home and faces a moral dilemma when he finds out how lucrative the foreclosure business really is. High tension and high stakes prop up this movie, but the amount of foul language drags it down.

Dennis Nash is a frustrated construction worker who’s just been laid off from a job without pay due to lack of project funds. Together with his mom and pre-teenage son, he lives in the small family home where he was raised in an Orlando, Florida suburb. Not bringing in enough money to make ends meet, the bank has been threatening foreclosure for months, and Dennis is unable to find any help legally or financially to stave off eviction. After Dennis loses his case in court, a real-estate broker, Rick Carver, shows up with sheriff’s deputies in tow to make sure Dennis and his family are out of the house on eviction day. Only given a few minutes to pack what they need, they quickly find themselves locked out of their home with nowhere to go.

Dennis checks his family into a seedy downtown hotel crowded with other evicted families who have been living there for months, and even years. Taking it the hardest is his son who can no longer attend school with his friends. His mom, Lynn, thinks it’s best if they move to Tampa where they have extended family, but Dennis isn’t willing to give up on their home and promises her that he’ll find a way to get it back. The next morning he shows up at Rick Carver’s headquarters accusing the workers of stealing some of his tools while they were moving his belongings from the house. Carver denies it happened but offers him a job when an emergency call comes in about a house with a septic problem. In need of money, Dennis takes the job on the spot.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Dennis continues to impress Carver with his skills and proves to be intelligent enough to trust with some of his trade secrets. Before long, he takes Dennis under his wing as a full-time protégé. Though grateful for the increasingly lucrative opportunities, Dennis begins to question Carver’s business ethics. He goes along by reasoning that Carver is simply exploiting loopholes, so, as the profits mount, greed gets in the way of any moral reservations he has. He also comes to an agreement with Carver that allows him to get his own house returned.

However, things get much tougher when Dennis is put in charge of evictions, and his family finds out what he’s doing for a living. In a desperate move to secure a huge contract, Carver forges papers for foreclosure proceedings against a family Dennis knows personally. As the situation turns potentially deadly, Dennis must decide whether or not to risk everything by doing the right thing.

The pace of 99 HOMES feels quick throughout most of the movie, never letting the story lag or allowing unnecessary scenes to fill space. In fact, this drama borders on thriller status in a couple of scenes, as clever editing and carefully timed music impress upon viewers the psychological tension that the characters are experiencing on screen. A major plot hole sticks out in the third act that seems immediately obvious, but somehow the characters never pick up on it, which paves a way for the required dramatic points to be made. The ending is also disappointing, because it leaves two storylines unresolved.

Despite the unethical business practices and immoral decision-making of the characters, 99 HOMES takes place within the context of a moral worldview. Dennis is portrayed as a blue-collar, honest, hardworking guy. As the movie progresses, it’s his conscience is greatly bothered by his dishonest boss. Even his boss, Carver, displays hints of moral awareness, having come from the same type of folk as Dennis.

Foul language is the major downside of this movie with more than 80 obscenities and profanities. There are also unnecessary references to sexual acts and derogatory name-calling. Some drunkenness and violence contribute to the movie’s unsuitability for families and children. Extreme caution is advised, even for older adults.

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’99 Homes’ Movie Review

How desperate would you have to be to accept a job from a man who kicked your family to the curb? Would you be able to put aside your anger and moral outrage over the loss of your home if the man who tossed you out dangled a lifeline when no other options were available? And if you said yes to his offer of employment, how much shame would you feel at being grateful for his money?

99 Homes is set during the worst U.S. housing crisis in history, a period in which homes were foreclosed on at one of the highest rates in history in large part due to abusive lending practices by financial institutions and mortgage companies. The court system was unsympathetic to homeowners behind on their payments, and banks snatched up properties while families were left struggling to find an alternate place to call home.

Andrew Garfield plays Dennis Nash, a single father faced with taking jobs from Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), the realtor who enforced the bank’s foreclosure order. The Nash family was literally given just a few minutes to take only the items they could not live without, with their neighbors and friends watching in shock from the sidewalk as Dennis was blocked from re-entering his home by law enforcement officers working with Carver. After losing his family’s home, Dennis, his young son, and his mother (Laura Dern) have no choice but to move into a low-rent motel where other families in similar situations are also temporarily housed.

Dennis works in construction but the jobs are few and far between so when Rick offers him a chance to earn much-needed cash, there isn’t an option to say anything other than yes if he wants to feed his family. He’s too ashamed to admit who he’s working for to his mother and son, but he’s not too ashamed to take on additional job duties for Rick, eventually becoming his right-hand man. And in that elevated capacity, Dennis becomes the man he hated, knocking on doors and delivering the devastating eviction news to people who have no means to fight the legal orders.

Co-writer/director Ramin Bahrani ( Man Push Cart , At Any Price ) doesn’t paint Rick as the devil in a business suit but instead allows him to be multi-layered, providing a plausible backstory into how he became a millionaire at the expense of struggling Orlando, Florida homeowners. Michael Shannon is near brilliant as a man who on the surface appears to barely register the consequences of his actions as they’re taking place, yet you know he fully realizes the impact he has on the lives of strangers in financial trouble.

Andrew Garfield is terrific as Dennis Nash, a father who will do anything no matter how it tears him apart inside to keep his son feed and safe. The best scenes in 99 Homes come when it’s just Shannon and Garfield’s characters on screen, feeling each other out, and Shannon’s Carver pushing all the right buttons in order to get Dennis to alter his moral code in order to collect a healthy, life-altering paycheck.

99 Homes is exceptional storytelling until the final act. The resolution to Dennis’ moral dilemma over being employed by a man he despises is too tidy and false. It plays out as though the true ending would have been too harsh for audiences to accept and so this alternate ending was selected just so we could feel slightly better about having empathized with Dennis in the first place. Was this ending what Bahrani had in mind all along? I walked out of the theater feeling cheated by just how neatly the story ended and disappointed by what’s basically a cop-out after having been emotionally invested in Dennis’ journey from the opening scenes. 99 Homes rang the doorbell on greatness and then ran away before letting the audience see what’s really behind the door.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and a brief violent image

Running Time: 112 minutes

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Movie Review: 99 Homes (2014)

• Roberto Montiel
• Movie Reviews
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• --> February 28, 2016

Ok, so this means not to be a partisan review, OK? Yes, it means to broach its subject from a reasonable, logical standpoint. Yes, it in no way wills to oversee the bear gut and occasional sentimentality of the film it sets to look at. Yes, it wants to talk about current issues while taking the film as the vehicle it is. Yet it is aware, and I am just as well, that a logical and reasonable approach does sound a lot like partisanship nowadays — but that has nothing to do with the original intent of wanting to think things through. Hope this you can do with me.

Let me start by praising the film’s timing: 99 Homes is an extraordinarily relevant picture in that it is immensely timely. This is a story of greed and what it takes to be successful in the one arena in which the person who’s today’s incarnation of this doctrine made his fortune first and foremost: Real Estate — the person whose name I shall spare for when it’s three times spelled he wins another point in the polls.

But back to Real Estate: Real $tate. 99 Homes digs into the real meaning of this practice that started as a concept and is now closely associated with a curse for a great fraction of the American people after the housing business bubbled, boomed and blew at everyone’s faces in 2008. What Real $tate $tands for is raw capitalism, trafficking with the impossible, with land and buildings affixed in the ground, which rendered these places as ephemeral as they were expendable, taking back the estate to its original being as a state, something that shall pass as moments pass: Just a state of mind. Having a home is just a state of mind. Having a roof over your head is just a state of mind, the current state of affairs that might change at any time . . . particularly if you didn’t have the means to acquire it in the first place.

Credit, the backbone of capitalism as we know it and of free market as we want to know it, is not based on trust when looked from this angle; a credit is actually an opened opportunity for people to acquire more than they can get on the implicit promise that they’ll be able to pay should their current state of affairs doesn’t dare to change, which, in a volatile market (the current market), is nothing short of a long shot. And it is upon these potential failures that real estate brokers found a goldmine in the housing crisis that by 2009 was producing more homeless people than hurricanes and earthquakes combined: The best possible place for real estate moguls to grow their fortunes and for real estate upstarts to start theirs. I don’t know about you, but real estate mogul sounds a lot like a boogey man to me, like small town goblin or little village ghoul, one of whom appears in this film as the perfect mentor for a young mentee who has just lost his home.

Rick Carver (a hypnotically despicable Michael Shannon, “ Man of Steel ”) is looking at the dead body of a man who has just blown his brains out as the result of the former evicting the latter from his home. The body is the movie’s first shot, which quickly pans to Carver’s annoyed face, knowing the extra time this will take in his already tight schedule of kicking people off their houses. This is how we meet Dennis Nash (a heartwarmingly disappointing Andrew Garfield, “ The Amazing Spider-Man ”) who, in court, loses his case in less than 30 seconds and thinks he has 30 days to appeal the judge’s decision, when it turned out he had less than 15 hours to vacate his house. Living with his mom, Lynn (a delightfully righteous Laura Dern, “ Wild ”), and his son, Connor (a complexly innocent Noah Lomax, “ Playing for Keeps ”), Dennis has taken the hard responsibilities of his household as a young single father. Recently laid off without payment from his work in construction, he finds himself losing yet another short battle against the absurdity he’s living and kicked off from his home by the cold-blooded e-smoker Carver — with the law on his side (having used a real Sheriff for these sequences provides them with a veracity that makes them at some points almost unwatchable).

After moving to a hotel and unsuccessfully trying to find a gig, Dennis finds himself working for Carver, who takes him under his squama as his new challenge and protégée; where Rick sees promise, he seizes the irresistible inducement of corrupting a constitutionally good person, thus proving to himself that greed is there for everyone who wants to seize it. This is the arc that makes 99 Homes worth watching. Like Gordon Gekko did with Bud Fox, we find Carver slowly carving in Dennis’ psyche the marks that made him realize that, in a free market, it is all about you or them. Watching Dennis’ gradual immersion into the world that first beat him up, going from evictee to evictor, marks a worthy retelling of what “Wall Street” meant in the 1980’s: The real definition of a broker.

The rise of the broker in the 1980’s saw the slow decline of the kingpin. This was the ultimate gangster, the legit $treet-god, the tidied thief clothed as an immaculate impresario. What the remarkable and recent “ The Big Short ” showed at a larger, almost abstract, scale, 99 Homes illuminates from within, centering on two characters rivaling, competing and despising themselves while learning from each other. One, how to become wealthy while waiving his scruples, and the other how to prove that everyone is a potential asshole should they have the correct role-model. And all these director Ramin Bahrani does bringing formal undertones from Werner Herzog’s dazzling revisiting of Abel Ferrara’s classic of petit abuse of power and corruption “Bad Lieutenant.” Particularly, this can be noted in the use of saturated light by cinematographer Bobby Bukowski (whose work with daylight has always been a sort of watermark). Also, although the movie is set in Orlando, Florida (one of the four States in the US that suffered most acutely from the housing bubble), a substantial amount of the film was shot in New Orleans — a place wherein the sun never lies, only the night does in days of carnival.

99 Homes gets into the entrails of the new broker, the one for whom there is no difference between a house and a home, for whom, as a matter of fact, there is no difference between a house and a big building — a box. The difference between a priceless place and a vacated box is the one a real e$tater cannot afford to make. Vacated when acquired, priceless when is sold, a house represents nothing but potential profit: It doesn’t exist anywhere but in the grand-scale of big business. “Large boxes, small boxes,” tells Carver to Nash at a booze-induced confession time, “what really matters is what you’ve got” — a statement equivalent to “what’s really important is who’ve you fucked”: An economy that’s been built on taking advantage of other people’s mishaps, of other people’s crises.

This is, according to Nobel laureate economist (and Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s favorite pornographer) Milton Friedman, what made America great (Reagan’s original mandate, remember?): Greed. This is, basically, how our Real $tate mogul promises to make it great again, by bringing greed back on — in full force.

Bahrani’s look at American capitalism (as has been his look at American society from the standpoint of minorities) is both accurate and angry. He looks and evaluates (possibly the latter harming a little the big-picture-take of his project) the way in which a system that transformed greed into a virtue (for, as Friedman says, there is no society that is not originally ran by greed) corrodes the individual to the point of making it the only possible center of a person’s life, since stepping over other people could be considered to be the best quality of a truly ambitious character. When the only reward for hard-work is poverty (as is the case for an astronomic amount of blue-collar Americans), corruption and scam seem like primal survival skills. Such an economy, it’s worth pointing out, is not kept by the people who make, but rather moved by those who know what, when, where and from whom to take.

The greatest asset for the Friedmanite American (if you allow me the neologism) is their overwhelming individuality, which is often reflected in the great lengths to which their personalities grow (or rather bloat). But it is not so much a cult to the personality what these Friedmanites gain; it is, instead, a cult to this person’s achievements, which become their personality — if with achievement we understand net worth. A powerful personality is thus that which mirrors its accomplishments. America’s (US’s greed already marked in its Munronean demonym) favorite myth, the self-made man (yes, majorly a man), the one who overcomes the odds to win over the rest and rise a mogul, a ghoul that comes back and terrorizes losers to take all their possessions with them, is the uncontested model for all respectable blue-collared-Friednamites in love with the free market they all think one day will make them rich.

And this is precisely the divide we should be dreading already, particularly after knowing what it takes for the 99 to keep the 1’s lifestyle: A crash, a crisis, another crash, another crisis over which these number 1’s and 1 percenters will cash and profit. It’s no coincidence that the way in which Carver recognizes his future pupil’s potential is when Dennis is the only one who accepts to literally clean a load of shit for him. And this is where every obscene fortune starts for those infinitesimal number of people who weren’t born into a wealthy family: By cleaning shit for other, wealthy, very wealthy preferably, people. This latter are who actively seek and see opportunities in crises, and who, sometimes, as history doesn’t tire to show us, actively provoke them or, at the very least, allow them when they could’ve done otherwise.

99 Homes is, in this sense, a timely parable and a plucky thriller of what happens to a social and a political system that leans toward the economy as its main ethical barometer. For this is the kind of system that will continue to “bail out the winners,” as Carver asserts, while cashing on the losers, deep sunk inside their own anger. And here is where I cannot avoid but being reasonable and logical: If the world, or the US for that matter, is going to finally and openly accept and elect someone who polarizes the whole humanity into two categories, winners and losers, odds are that you, or someone for whom you care about, will be at the losing end of the stick. Now you go cast your ballot.

Tagged: con man , father , homeless , revenge , unemployment

Roberto is a PhD recipient in Philosophy and Postcolonial Literature.

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