in the grip of the python
by
Douglas Messerli
Ramin
Bahrani and Amir Naderi, screenplay, based on a sotry by Ramin Bahrani and
Bahareh Azimi), Ramin Bahrani (director) 99
Homes / 2015 (general US release)
The
dilemmas portrayed in Ramin Bahrani’s 2015 film, 99 Homes, are not precisely tragic events, although the work begins
with a suicide. Rather, Bahrani’s film slowly uncoils, along its characters’
lives, like a python seeking to slowly strangle each of them to death. And like
the python’s grip, the more these figures struggle, the more deeply they are
trapped within the destroyer’s grip.
The “destroyer” here, working in
conjunction with the banks and the US government, is Rick Carver (Michael
Shannon), a seemingly slimy house “flipper,” who forecloses on houses whose
owners have failed to pay on their mortgages. Using two hired cops and a team
of brutes, he evicts families, demanding the tenants leave their home
immediately, with only three moments to grab whatever they can scoop up, before
his men remove all the family’s beloved possessions into the street. If things
get violent, as they sometimes do, he has an ankle gun, the two “hired” cops,
and a phone on speed-dial to the local police. The more the family argues, the
less time they have to collect their trinkets and to plan for their new lives.
Carver, having begun his life as a real
estate agent, has quickly come to see that the real money lies not in helping
people to find their dream house, but in helping himself to the remnants of what
their unaffordable dreams have cost them. And in that sense, he stands at the
reverse end of the American Dream. Yet Carver, having been able over the years
to justify his dirty doings, has long since ceased even believing that society
is democratic, that if you work hard and do good you will receive your just
award. Set sometime during the huge American economic downturn of the first
decade of this century, the events of this film only prove to Carver that only
those who are smart enough to grab hold of what others can’t afford, allows for
survival. In his cynical view of the world, it is he who is on the side of the
law, while the others have simply been criminal in their abuse of their own
lives and loved ones.
We quickly are forced to look, however,
from the other side of the lens, as we follow a good, if already broken family,
trying to go about their lives. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a skillful
construction worker who, working on a new house, is told to go home because the
would-be owners have been unable to obtain their loan. Times are bad, and new
jobs are not to be easily found. Living with his mother Lynn (Laura Dern) and
his child, Connor (Noah Lomax)—whose mother’s absence is never fully
explained—Dennis and his family are suddenly unable to pay their mortgage, and
despite their delusion that they may have 30 more days before the house, in
which they have lived all their lives, will be repossessed, are forced by
Carver’s tactics to immediately move to a run-down motel, filled by people just
like themselves, with no future. Their sudden descent from good, middle-class
folk to American outsiders, just a step up from the Oakies of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is so painful that
it is difficult to watch.
Even though this family manages to gather
most of their possessions, Dennis discovers that some of his most important
tools—necessary if he is ever to return to work—have been stolen by one of
Carver’s men, and goes to Carver’s offices to confront him. He is unable to retrieve
his tools, but there again encounters the real estate dealer, who offers him a day
job to help clean up a house whose tenants, in anger, have backed up the
sewage, literally, leaving a ring of shit inside their abandoned home. It is
obviously the most disgusting job one might imagine, yet Dennis is so desperate
that he takes on the task.
Within days, the skillful charmer, clearly
in league with the devil himself, has been able to convince Dennis to join his
workers, stealing air conditioners and pool cleaners from empty houses to
resell them to his clients before they can move in. Dennis does such a good
job, he quickly finds himself doing his own evictions. Although it is clear
that he hates the task, he is being paid such a good amount, and he is so
determined to restore his family home, that he swallows all pride and does
Carver’s bidding.
Even with this new terrifying
development, Dennis is unable to quit his now hateful job. Like a punk version
of Donald Trump, Carver has so convinced his “apprentice” that everyone who
doesn’t succeed in this manner is a “loser.” When Dennis explains that he must
get his family out of the motel, but is legally unable yet to move to their old
home, Carver tries to consul him not to be sentimental of homes: “They’re just
boxes,” he argues. Buy another home, two other homes, he cautions. Forget about
the “family” home.
Although his inability to comprehend the
sentiment so many families attach to their homes, in the larger sense, he is
right. The real problem for Dennis does not truly concern his family domocile—he
does indeed buy another home for his loved ones—but that he has not been able
to be honest about his moral abnegation. Taking them to their “new,” far more
luxurious home cannot assuage their own disappointment in him, and grandmother
and son arrange to live with Lynn’s brother in Tampa rather than stay with
Dennis.
Carver, who now truly believes he
controls the young former carpenter, now involved in a grand real estate plot,
attempts to squelch a lawsuit by illegally placing a missing document in the
original file. The family suing is one that Dennis has met, early on, in the
courthouse, and whom he has recently warned of eviction. Finally, coming to the
moral low-point of his life, Dennis delays in handing over the fraudulent file
to the corrupt court clerk. At the last moment, however, the waiting clerk
spots him, pulling the envelope from Dennis’ hands, allowing the judge to
maintain that since the document is now in the file, the family has no case.
As if testing Dennis, Carver demands that
he join him for the actual eviction; arriving at the home, however, it becomes
apparent that the former owner, brandishing a rifle, has holed up inside with
his family, determined to defend is little domain. The police arrive and a
stand-off with assuredly violent consequences seems inevitable.
To save the day, Dennis dares the dangerous
shooter, moving directly toward him to explain that indeed the house does legally belong to the family, since
he has placed a fraudulent document into the file.
Los Angeles,
October 6, 2015
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