99 HOMES 112 minutes. Rating: NNN
To save his family home, an Orlando construction worker (Andrew Garfield) takes a job working for a realtor (Michael Shannon), helping him evict other families – and do a few other things of questionable legal standing.
Ramin Bahrani’s latest is a step up from the dopey At Any Price but not as consistent or powerful as his earlier films Man Push Cart and Chop Shop. Though it starts out as a compelling look at a particularly ugly side of the American dream, the film gets less and less nuanced as it goes along, abandoning texture and subtlety to make sure we don’t miss its fairly obvious points.
Garfield and Shannon are both great, though, and Laura Dern contributes a fine supporting turn as Garfield’s mother. But they can only do so much with that third act, when Bahrani hangs everything on a moral choice so contrived that it feels almost insulting.
