99 Homes

I saw this at TIFF 2014 where it seemed to be received pretty positively.

Kudos to those involved with casting as every actor/actress, from the leading Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon, right down to those who were only in one or two scenes, did a really good job. There were a lot of confrontational emotions in this movie and the actors/actresses did a great job of getting me to empathize with their characters. I had a hard time believing that Laura Dern's young-looking character was Garfield's character's mother, but she acted well.

I felt that Bahrani struck a good balance between showing the audience Garfield's character's life with his family VS his professional life.

I found the music throughout the movie to be pretty appropriate. The music chosen for each scene complimented the dramatic tone of what was happening.

There were two things about the movie that bothered me enough to pull me out of the tense drama temporarily: (1) There were a couple of big coincidental moments (one of which is directly related to the final scene) that seemed a bit too fate-like. For a movie with the very real backdrop of the US housing market crash, and such believable characters, these unrealistic occurrences seemed out of place. (2) At one point, a montage format is used to quickly show Garfield's character go through a bunch of different exchanges with other characters. This quick cutting from scenario to scenario is a missed opportunity to fully immerse us viewers in a couple of heart-wrenching moments. As a result, the mixed emotions that I recognized I was supposed to feel weren't as strong as they could have been.

Overall, this drama was well done. I think it could have been better in some areas, but it was still a nice watch.

99 Homes (2014)

*** (out of 4)

An unemployed father (Andrew Garfield) loses his home through a foreclosure but soon he starts working for real estate agent Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) who just happens to be the man who evicted him from his home. Pretty soon the man is learning how to make major cash but soon he begins having mixed emotions on his job of evicting people.

Ramin Bahrani co-wrote and directed this rather powerful and thought-provoking film that deals with the market crash of 2008. While everything here is very much fictional the director certainly gets his message across with some very realistic drama. It also doesn't hurt that you get two very good performances including one that ranks among the best of the year.

I will say that there are some flaws in the movie including the fact that the film pretty much is heroes and villains. I say this meaning that the entire foreclosure plot isn't really dealt with in a fair way but the point of the movie was to show how corrupt people can corrupt an already corrupt system. Some of the best moments in the movie deal with people being told they can no longer stay in their homes and these are the moments that work the best in the movie.

Bahrani does a very good job at keeping you caught up in the story being told, although the entire greed angle is something we've seen several times before. The cinematography, music score and all the technical stuff is quite good. Of course, it's the performances that make the film so memorable with Garfield turning in his best work to date. He has a lot of emotions to play here and perfectly nails them. Both Laura Dern and Clancy Brown are good in their small roles as well. With that said, the real star is once again Shannon who is remarkably cold as the snake Realtor who determines that his money is worth more than anyone's feelings.

Again, there are some very powerful moments in the film but the simple greed plot line kinda wore out towards the end of the picture. Still, it's technically very well-made and features a terrific performance by Shannon, which makes it worth watching.

I think most of America was impacted in at least some capacity by the 2008 economic crisis/crash. Obviously, the housing market was hit the hardest and really at the forefront of the situation. 99 Homes tells the story of a single father who still lives with his mother in his childhood home having to deal with an eviction and the unexpected events that follow.

99 Homes is a solid film. It has two of the best actors in the business right now with Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield. It's actually surprisingly how many people don't realize how good these two are. Both known primarily for the comic book roles respectively, but they have both down some tremendous indie work as well. The film does a good job of using both of their strengths and playing off each other to create a very intelligent screenplay. Shannon is perfect for this role, but in some ways he's also not. He's great at playing antagonistic characters but in this case its almost impossible to have any sympathy for his character. It makes for an unrealistic dynamic. The film never bored me, in fact I was engaged throughout the story, but I think at times it just became too unrealistic.

Garfield's character's arc was in particular the most unbalanced. It took a lot for me to get passed the fact that he gets hired by the same guy who evicted his home, but the actors made it intriguing enough for me to push it off to the side for awhile. But when you continue to build Garfield's character up to places that just aren't believable, it can take you out of the film. I think you could argue that the 'low' for Garfield just wasn't low enough for me to feel the heights of his 'highs'. It's one of the things Scorsese does so well is create arcs for characters that never feel hyper- realistic.

Laura Dern is also in the movie and does a fantastic job as Garfield's mother. She is the emotional weight that the film needed and brings his character back to the real world when it got too exaggerated. The film will definitely pull on your heart strings at times, especially when you see all sorts of people being ripped from their homes. I just think the structure of the story was unbalanced at times with arcs being a bit too unrealistic.

+Garfield & Shannon's dynamic

+Dern's emotional pull

+Heartbreaking story that's close to American's hearts

-Unrealistic at times

-Low wasn't low enough for Garfield

7.0/10

The movie started off strong... great characters ... and good performances The last 20min the movie just started taken a turn for the worst .... Made no sense.

The movie starts out well, and the first eviction scene will leave you shaking in your boots imagining your family and belongings getting foreclosed and tossed into the street. I can't think of another film that focuses on the eviction process so intensely.

You're better skipping the end of the movie (after the scene with the old man). The last forty minutes of the film are not satisfying at all, and just gets dumb with characters acting more and more ridiculously. In the beginning of the movie, many of the characters act over the top for the sake of dramatic tension, but it it gets to be too much towards the end.