99 Homes (2015) * * *

Directed by:  Ramin Bahrani

Starring:  Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, Laura Dern, Tim Guinee, Noah Lomax

99 Homes is a provocative, hard-hitting, relentless drama which allows the viewers to ask what they would do if confronted with the thought of losing their home.     Would they bend some rules in the name of making more money than they ever could honestly?     Would they be able to perform the soul-sucking work someone like Dennis Nash has to?     Could they steal, lie,  and cheat?    

Actually, 99 Homes is this type of drama that poses these questions.    Also, is there a point in which even the most desperate wouldn't go beyond?    It provides an extreme example of what some would be willing to do to keep themselves afloat at the expense of the little guy.     And then it would ask, what would you do?    At first, I admit I had some trouble with the ending because it felt a little too morally upright, but the more I reflect on it, I realized that there was a point in which Dennis, the film's hero, would not go beyond.    Is it something others would do?    Who knows. 

Andrew Garfield plays Dennis, a hard working construction worker who defaults on his home loan and is quickly, coldly evicted by real estate broker Rick Carver (Shannon).    Carver is thriving in these harsh economic times.    He flips the foreclosed homes for a profit.     He is the epitome of a banking system that recklessly approved loans to less than creditworthy applicants.     Carver explains that his job before the housing crash was to put people into homes.     Now, his job is kicking them out.     He does not take any special glee in removing people from their property, but he sure doesn't mind the cash flow it generates.     He approaches his job with a certain ruthlessness that Dennis may or may not possess.    

After Dennis and his mother (Dern) and son (Lomax) are kicked out of their house and forced to live in a nearby motel, he travels to Carver's office to get back tools stolen by Carver's crew.    Carver offers him a job cleaning up a sewage backup at one of his properties.     He finds Carver needs a lot of work done on his properties and Dennis now has a job making more money than ever.     Dennis soon graduates to becoming that guy who knocks on the door and evicts families early in the morning.     This isn't pleasant work.    Dennis sometimes has to muster up all of his strength just to perform his duty.     But as the cash rolls in and the prospect of possibly reclaiming his former home grows brighter, he finds he can live with it.    

Garfield's character is the one most can identify with.     He is someone who is forced to do things he doesn't necessarily like in order to put food on the table.     Many people go to jobs each day they don't enjoy in order to pay bills.     Dennis' issue is he makes more money off of other people's misery than he will ever make in construction.      Business is booming and things are great for him financially.     99 Homes could be The Big Short as seen through the eyes of actual homeowners. 

Things are not black and white in this world or in the real world in general.     Garfield and Shannon deliver humanizing portraits of two men who do what they do because it keeps the sheriff from kicking them out of their homes one day.       At first, Rick Carver may seem like the heartless bad guy, but he reveals more as we get to know him.     We hear his stories of his father and his background and we see he is driven by fear as much as anyone else.      Shannon does a particularly good job of not showing us all the cards at first, but soon gives us a man who came to terms with what he has to do a long time ago.      He was where Dennis is now and he is numb to the suffering.

Then, 99 Homes steps into interesting waters, whether you believe the ending or not.     It involves one home in particular which holds the key to growing Rick's business.     Rick is willing to bend the law to see that the owner is evicted.     Dennis reaches a crossroads and has to decide how much he is willing to see someone wrongfully evicted from his home.    Up until that point, 99 Homes was an unblinking portrayal of these harsh times, but I suppose the true moral quandary needed to be introduced so we could see for ourselves whether there is a point in which someone stands his moral ground.     It challenged the viewer to determine how far they would go to protect what they have.     The ending may have you saying, "What a dope this guy is," instead of "Wow, what a good thing he just did."    Or it may be the other way around.     What would you do?    It all depends.