Movie examines foreclosure crisis and human cost
Treat homes like ‘boxes,’ advises a lead character
In “99 Homes,” a movie opening next week about the foreclosure crisis, there’s a scene where Rick Carver, a sleazy real estate agent evicting people on behalf of banks, tells his protege, “Don’t get emotional about real estate, Nash.” Homes “are boxes.”
To me, that line gets at the root of the financial meltdown. The rise of subprime lending and lax regulation turned homes into boxes that could be packaged into securities that could be bought, sold, margined and speculated against without any regard given to the folks living in them. Homeowners were not blameless, because many used their homes as cash machines or became speculators themselves, buying up a number of boxes to rent or flip.
The film, set in Florida in 2010, focuses on what hap-
pened when waves of evictions started crashing into lives and communities.
The Faustian drama centers on an Orlando construction worker named Dennis Nash, played by Andrew Garfield of “Spider-Man” and “The Social Network” fame. Carver, played by “Boardwalk Empire’s” Michael Shannon, evicts Nash from the home he shares with his mom and young son. They move into a motel alongside other families who lost their homes.
Unable to find construction work amid the housing crash, Nash accepts a job offer from Carver and eventually ends up evicting people himself and engaging in foreclosure-related scams.
Spreading the blame
In one moving montage, Nash shows up with a sheriff on the doorsteps of various homeowners — many played by non-actors — including an elderly man, a pregnant woman and a former neighbor. He offers them cash for keys or orders their possessions moved onto their lawns, ignoring their pleas for time or mercy — just as Carver ignored his.
Although the movie is definitely more sympathetic to homeowners than to banks and real estate vultures, it spreads the blame around.
“The film doesn’t take sides,” director Ramin Bahrani said in an interview in San Francisco this week. “When Michael says a home is a box, something you can make a profit on, I understand it. When Laura Dern (who plays Nash’s mom) says a home is a sense of community, a place of safety, memories, a place to reflect on who you are as a human being, I understand that.”
Bahrani got the idea for the movie because he was “curious about what turned the world upside down economically.” He read hundreds of articles and 20 or 30 books on the subject. But it wasn’t until he went down to Florida to research the subject that he realized it would be a thriller.
“I liked ‘Wall Street,’ ‘The Hustler,’ ‘On the Waterfront,’ ‘Training Day,’ ‘The Insider’ with Russell Crowe. Tense thrilling movies about something deeper, some moral or social issue. Just thrilling is not enough,” said Bahrani, who cowrote the screenplay.
In Florida he met Lynn Szymoniak, an attorney who uncovered the robosigning scandal while fighting to save her home. “She took me into the foreclosure courts, the rocket dockets, where they decide your case in 60 seconds,” he said.
He spent time with Beth Davalos, a social worker who helped families on the edge of homelessness. He visited motels on the highway leading to Disney World, where evicted families lived alongside prostitutes, drug dealers and migrant workers.
The film was shot in New Orleans, for taxcredit reasons. The sheriff who helps evict Nash is a real sheriff who has done evictions. The nonactors in the eviction montage “were accessing emotions from another place, Hurricane Katrina. They knew what it was like to lose a home,” he said.
Corruption, scams
The script Nash follows when evicting homeowners came from real estate agents. “Being with real estate brokers was eye-opening in terms of how much corruption, how many scams there were,” Bahrani said.
The character of William Freeman — the “guy in the skyscraper” who is trying to buy foreclosed homes in bulk — was based loosely on David J. Stern, a Florida lawyer
99 Homes (R) opens at selected Bay Area theaters next Friday. who was doing tens of thousands of foreclosures a year on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he said.
A Mother Jones investigation alleged that his firm was “routinely falsifying legal paperwork in an effort to push borrowers out of their homes as quickly — and profitably — as possible.” He was fired by Fannie and Freddie and disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court, but never went to jail. His mansion on a private island in Florida is on the market for $32 million.
Composite characters
The other characters are composites. But when Garfield went to Florida for research, he met a construction worker at a Home Depot who took a job doing evictions after he lost his home and couldn’t eat or sleep. One day, the man had to evict his best friend. Months later, he couldn’t tolerate it and quit. A year later the man’s friend told him, “I forgive you.” The man asked why. The friend said, “I’m doing evictions.”
Bahrani said his “heart breaks” for the real estate brokers he met and who are portrayed in the film, saying that none got into the business to evict people. That includes Carver. “He’s corrupt. Don’t get me wrong. He’s part of the system.” He said the “most important dialogue” is when Nash asks Carver, “Is it worth it?” Carver answers, “As opposed to what?”
Bahrani screened the movie for Bay Area tech workers this week. “One of the tech guys said, ‘At first I saw myself hating (Nash), then understanding him. At the end, I found myself not knowing what I would have done.’ ”
Although the foreclosure crisis might seem like a distant memory in the Bay Area, where the crisis now is finding an affordable home, in Florida more than 1 in 5 homes sold in June was bank-owned or a short sale, according to CoreLogic.
The name of the film derives from a plot point but also pays homage to economist Joseph Stiglitz, who coined “the 99 percent” in his Vanity Fair article on income inequality.