Generation Wealth
With Generation Wealth, filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield creates a documentary collage blending memoir and essay, exploring the culture of money in contemporary society. Rooting the film in her 25-year journey taking photos of wealth and opulence, Greenfield reflects on the pressures of capitalism in her own life. Bookended by the staging of a photography show, Generation Wealth is as much a personal investigation as it is a portrait of the culture of excess.
Unlike her previous film, The Queen of Versailles, which focused on the Siegel family’s dream and struggles to build the largest house in America, this film offers a wider lens to the viewer. Years, sometimes decades, after she first took photos of rich kids and hedge-fund millionaires, Greenfield stages a new series of interviews where she asks her subjects to reflect on their relationship with wealth. Covering a wide range of subjects within the wider context of money, such as family, work, sex and beauty, the film seems to aim for a full portrait of our cultural obsession with capital.
Generation Wealth has individual moments that succeed. For the most part, the interviews are personal and revealing. Greenfield’s injection of her own life experience adds another layer, as the line between her role as photographer and her subjects feels increasingly blurred. Yet, as a whole, the documentary fails to say anything fresh about contemporary culture. The film offers the idea that our compulsion toward excess is ruinous. At best, we are robbing ourselves of individual happiness and at worst, we are precipitating the end of the world.
The individual tragedies inspired by greed and desire are heartfelt but not necessarily illuminating. They might inspire you to temporarily hold your loved ones a little closer, but the film offers no solutions to the “problems” to which it attempts to draw our attention.
There does seem to be a missed opportunity as most of the film’s subjects are still and likely always will be indecently wealthy. Exceptions include Kacey Jordan, the adult performer who was thrust into the spotlight with Charlie Sheen and went from living in her car to staying in a million-dollar penthouse. Her story is marked by depression, suicide and miscarriages. Many of the other middle-class subjects who temporarily touch the ethereal possibilities of wealth suffer unduly in their inability to “keep up with the Kardashians.”
Tackling so many subjects makes the film feel a bit like a travelogue of tragedy. From one subject to the next, we are offered broad insights into plastic surgery, family, work and criminality that might have individualistic flourishes but are held back by the limits of personal anecdote. Greenfield’s editing, which includes a few too many on the nose references to Donald Trump, feels like it takes the easy route of self-congratulating hand-wringing rather than really taking the time to investigate the problems at hand.
Greenfield may have simply intended to make a portrait of our culture of wealth, but the reason that feels so lacking is because it’s all been said and done. Listening to hedge-fund managers discuss the rush of making millions in a week and middle-class women travelling to Brazil to get cosmetic surgery just isn’t new anymore. While Greenfield has a great eye for the absurdity and tragedy of wealth, the film’s overall message that “greed is bad,” just isn’t enough. Like so many portraits of the collapse of the American Empire, there seems to be a hopeless shrug that the status quo isn’t sustainable. The closest thing to a solution that’s on offer here is the suggestion that we should sit back and enjoy life’s simple pleasures before corporations find a way to commodify our spinal fluids. ★★½
MAKES THE FILM FEEL ... LIKE A TRAVELOGUE OF TRAGEDY.