'99 Homes' takes the housing bubble and bursts it

In the taut housing-bubble muckraker "99 Homes," foreclosed homeowners deface a residence with raw sewage, and write "kill bankers" on the wall.

Of course, we don't kill bankers, even crooked ones.

We don't even prosecute them.

Despite all the whining that's come from Wall Streeters in recent years, they've gotten off easy, even by the standards of the $190 billion they've paid (via shareholders, of course) in fines related to various mortgage scams.

But bankers and their apologists also have spent time and money constructing a self-absolving fairy tale that places most of the blame on government housing policies.

Like the aggrieved homeowner in "99 Homes," they throw a lot of crap at the wall, seeing if any of it sticks.

"99 Homes" is one of the few movies with the nerve to throw some of it back.

The movie stars Andrew Garfield as Florida construction worker Dennis Nash. He gets laid off, falls behind on his mortgage, loses his home and desperately goes to work for Ray Carver (Michael Shannon), the real-estate shark who snapped up Nash's house. Carver has turned foreclosure into a profitable (if not always legal) business.

But Shannon is the real star of the movie. He is wonderful, turning his great, granite head into a Rushmore-ian monument to an I-got-mine-Jack myopia that existed at every level of the inflating bubble.

If the movie is seen by enough people, Carver might become the Gordon Gekko of our latest greed orgy - so persuasive are his monologues about winners and losers and a man's absolute duty to end up among the former. Carver's stark calculus is that crooked bankers and reckless borrowers deserve each other, their loss is someone's gain, and that someone should be him.

For much of its length, "99 Homes" is that rare thing - a movie with moral imagination, willing to grant substance to a character like Carver, to give this particular devil his due.

Because Carver is so real, so formidable, there is also real drama in seeing him turn Nash from enemy to protege. Nash can survive, even flourish, if he's just willing to be the guy who puts other guy's stuff on the street (the eviction scenes, drawn from life, hit hard).

Nash's moral erosion is gripping because it makes so much sense. We meet him standing on the curb outside his house, his possessions piled on the lawn, wondering how he got there.

He was told to skip payments while the bank worked on a modification, while the bank pursued foreclosure behind his back. Playing by the rules, as Carver notes, got Nash put out with the "losers."

"99 Homes" is on firm ground here. These outrages really did happen, in countless cases. Banks really did tell people to stop making payments, then foreclosed on them anyway (sometimes because there was more money to be made foreclosing).

Banks, via intermediaries, really did forge thousands upon thousands of documents, producing them for "rocket docket" judges in order to confiscate homes (something that never gets mentioned when the moocher class has to sit for lectures about sanctity of private property and the rule of law).

This becomes part of Nash's job later in the movie, and figures in the too-hysterical finale, involving guns and cops and standoffs.

The movie's concluding scenes are much less effective than the coolly rendered predation that marks the preceding drama; we watch the velvet fingers of a "winning" hand wrapping around the vulnerable Nash.

I wish the movie had allowed Nash to follow Carver all the way into hell. Instead, the character spends the last third of the movie given to agonized hand-wringing, a tiresome pose Garfield is asked to hold for too long.

But the best of "99 Homes" stays with you, as it illustrates a principle one housing-bubble journalist put this way: When the bubble burst, owing money was treated as a worse crime than stealing it.

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