The Queen of Versailles

As taken as I was with the lessons in Margin Call, a story about a Lehman Bros.-like mortgage brokerage firm in the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, The Queen of Versailles is more powerful. And it's not about brokers—it's about a family that accepts all that cheap money, buys blindly, and declines maybe even more than the rest of us because it spends more than a small nation could. It's not an American dream; it's a nightmare.

At the beginning of this disturbing documentary, David Siegel owns Westgate Resorts, one of the world's largest timeshare companies. Worth billions, he spends those billions freely, aided by his clueless trophy wife, blonde and buxom beauty-contestant Jackie, who helps him plan the largest single-family home in the USA: 90,000 square feet of Versailles palace imitation—"kitsch" is perhaps the best descriptor.

Slowly director Lauren Greenfield lets the nice David talk about their fortune and the home. At the same time, Jackie has eight children, stating that without nannies she would never have that many. When the market tumbles, the Segals face not finishing their home and severely reducing their lifestyle, but not Jackie's spending or her nannies.

As in any good documentary, the players do all the heavy satirical lifting, in this case Jackie redefines white trash and the much older David clarifies the role men play who indulge their wives as long as they are hot and attentive. "Foolish old man" is an apt cliché for a decent guy who was smart enough to make billions, but not smart enough to avoid cheap money (which his timeshare sales staff sold in abundance itself to reckless, unsophisticated buyers—a sad irony for all involved) and a cheap wife.

As the documentary glides inexorably to its conclusion, we are left with the impression of a decent man who couldn't control his appetites and a Pollyanna wife who couldn't control her spending. Be warned, this is not Inside Job, an insightful documentary about how all of us contributed to the crash; it is rather a depressing insider look at how so many bought into the cheap money trap and could not get out.

My radio co-host and I had to take a half hour to detox from this misery before we could record our show in at least a minimal upbeat manner. The Queen of Versailles is unremittingly gloomy probably because a part of us all is hidden amongst that greed. And yet, it is in the best documentary tradition: truth will out.

After reading the top 2 IMDb reviews for this documentary using words like "appalling", "revolting", "tasteless", "classless" and everything short of "Nazi" to describe the subjects, I figured this would be a fun way to forget my own financial inadequacies by relishing in the multi-million dollar tragedy of a bunch of monsters who deserve to suck slime. So with that in mind I poured myself a cup of fresh blood and got my vampire on.

Immediately I was "disappointed" because, aside from having a pair of ivory tusks displayed in their living room, these people didn't display anything worthy of being flogged publicly as I was led to believe. Sure, their lifestyle was extravagant to a fault. But, ask any third-world kid who can't afford a pair of shoes, and you'll learn that extravagance is relative. No matter, thought I, wiping some drool off my non-designer jeans, this show is just getting started; I'm sure they'll spit on a few beggars in good time!

Actually quite the opposite. As the family begins to realize it's financial decay, instead of telling the laid-off employees to eat cake, Jackie actually started donating goods and volunteering at a local charity for their benefit. Aw man, way to kill a good feeding frenzy, thought I. Well, at least I can still hate her for all the excessive cosmetic treatments she keeps getting for her own vanity. Oops, wrong again. Those of us paying attention soon realize that she's not doing it for sheer vanity's sake but to try to please her husband as psychologically she seems insecure in that department. And as we learn more about the titular Queen of Versailles, we see many parallels between her and the other unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette in her paper mâché marriage to Louis XVI. Yes, the interpersonal drama runs thick, between all family members in different ways. And just as the French eventually realized that they maybe went a little too far with that whole guillotine thing, you see that the Siegels, while guilty of clueless indulgence yes, don't nevessarily deserve to get their financial heads lopped off. These people are not aberrations of humankind as you'd been led to believe by some reviews, but instead, this is the story of a normal American family that has been subjected to abnormal extremes.

True, the husband (a man of 1 emotion: stoic), did at one point talk about how he personally got Bush re-elected by means that "may not have been legal", but he immediately counters it with "but then we got involved in this Iraqi War, so maybe I didn't do that much good after all." That statement is the key to understanding this powerful documentary. It is NOT a spectacle of seeing Emperors thrown to the lions. Rather, it is a very Faustian tale of pride and arrogance that gets the best of humans, and humans eventually accepting or at least admitting to the possibility that they were wrong. I'm talking about all humans, not just these people.

I have to hand it to the tragic family for bearing their downfall much more nobly than their rise. In the end (especially after watching the deleted scenes showing more of their human side), I felt good--not because I had just witnessed a gruesome car crash like other viewers, but because these people (except maybe 1 individual? I won't spoil) had all evolved into something better.

In that respect, this is a very complex story which requires your full attention. It's not like a sporting event that has 1 good guy, 1 bad guy and 1 outcome. It's really one of the best illustrations of pride under pressure. And although my greatest financial hurdle consists of how to pay my $75 parking ticket, I can somehow associate with these ex-billionaires on how money, and lack thereof, changes us all.

Schadenfreude - pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. The entire audience at the screening of The Queen of Versailles experienced this feeling about the Siegel family; they are truly atrocious people. Two years ago, David and Jackie Siegel were billionaires. They had planes, Rolls Royces, multiple nannies for their seven kids, hosted parties for the Miss America pageant while David flirted with the contestants, and sat on a golden throne in their Orlando house during interviews for this documentary. They also began construction on a mansion called Versailles, a project which would become the largest house in the entire United States.

It appears the filmmakers wanted to document the rise of this monstrosity of a house and display the lifestyle of the obscenely rich. Even better, these rich people liked to flaunt in front of the camera, not enjoy their splendor in private ala Bill Gates. David Siegel proudly claims he is individually responsible for George W. Bush winning the state of Florida and therefore the presidency; however, he chuckles that what he did was not exactly legal. Oh yes, schadenfreude. David called himself the 'King of Time Shares'. He built 28 resorts and an enormous building on the Vegas strip, parceled them up, and sold them 52 different times to vacationers. Then, in what must have exceeded all of the filmmakers' expectations, the recession hit and everybody in the country stopped buying time shares.

The Siegels were billionaires and yet, they had no savings. They paid cash for the Versailles house and only later put a mortgage on it because that meant millions more in ready, liquid money. They put nothing away for college funds for their kids. In fact, Jackie stares at the camera exclaiming her children might actually have to go to college now. The Siegels can no longer keep up with the Versailles mortgage payments and put it up for sale unfinished for $75 million. The housing market just crashed, tens of thousands of families are entering foreclosure, including Jackie's best friend, and the Siegels are trying to move a $75 million dollar mistake. The realtors may not be quite up to the task of marketing the house since one of the agents exclaims how unique Versailles (pronouncing it Versize) is.

Nobody is buying time shares, therefore, there is no money coming in to the company, and David lays off 7,000 employees. He also fires 19 household servants. Dogs run around crapping all over the house and nobody picks it up. A lizard dies of lack of food and water, a fish floats at the top of its filthy tank, and one of the kids exclaims, "I didn't know we even had a lizard." Don't worry, Jackie still compulsively shops to add to the ridiculous piles of 'stuff' that the kids do not even know they have. She also maintains her plastic surgery regimen. Jackie's chest has enjoyed being a a third character in this whole mess.

Other than the Michael Moore type of documentaries which have a stated agenda, filmmakers are thought to be neutral arbiters. They film the action, interview the subjects, and edit it in a way fair to all the players. However, no matter how one edits the footage, the Siegels are going to come off looking like some very horrible people. David is 30 years Jackie's senior and now that their funds are rapidly dwindling away, he is starting to get tired of his third wife. He hides in his office (a couch in front of a flat screen surrounded by papers and food scraps) to enjoy being away from the chaos which his house has become.

You will not envy the Siegels. They still have more money than you do, but you would never switch places with them. I walked out of the theater with a new appreciation for my situation in life knowing that most of us are normal folks going about our business and enjoy time with our family and friends. The fact that there are folks like the Siegels out there, who by the way are shocked a bank bailout did not filter down to them, makes you shake your head in shame of the human race.

You have to laff when the "Queen"--often seemingly desperate to kiss her AH husband into some sort of affectionate submission (she always fails to receive anything other than an aggressively polite peck, which seems more like a 'kiss-off')-- the "Queen" plays the victim card, due to the financial upheaval in 2008. She's truly sickening, despite her "humble" roots. Were these pigs ever in real jeopardy? Well, their "conspicuous consumption, had to be "downsized" from poisonous excess to sheer madness, and meanwhile, the wonderful housekeeper has suffered and struggled to meet her own dreams--and you get the feeling she's cast her lot in with the wrong people. Fascinating and disgusting, see it.

I knew the back story to "Queen of Versailles" before I saw it, but I wasn't prepared for the extreme revulsion I felt for these characters, particularly David Segal. These folks are poster children for the worst extremes of our materialistic, narcissistic culture. Their values are money, ostentation, self-aggrandizement, acquisition and mindless hedonism. They are venomous leeches on society.

Yet I felt pity for them as well, particularly Jackie. She's something of an enigma. She boasts about getting an engineering degree so she wouldn't have to work as someone's assistant, yet she mostly devotes herself to keeping young-looking and voluptuous (those breasts of hers deserve some sort of special effects award) so she can snag and keep a rich hubby. As her world starts to fall apart around her, she begins to have some insights about what life is really about (not building the world's biggest house), yet still can't abandon her out-of-control shopping sprees or torturous visits to the beauty clinic.

The children, also, seem to be far more aware than their parents of the emptiness and ridiculousness of their lifestyle.

Fortunately, I saw very little of myself in this abhorrent couple, but I did see some similarities to friends and family. Everyone is susceptible to greed and an inflated sense of self. This film shows what happens when that proceeds unchecked and fueled by obscene wealth.