Movie review: 99 Homes

A scene from the movie 99 Homes.

Dynamic and passionate, thrumming with barely suppressed anger, this sleek American indie has the brains of a documentary, the soul of a moral fable and the beating pulse of a thriller. Dramatising the toxic-mortgage nightmare that devoured swathes of middle America after the Global Financial Crisis, it opens with a literal death and then charts a slow spiritual one. This is a world, it seems to say, in which nobody wins - not even the winners.

Bahrani, the son of Iranian migrants, made his name with films exploring the immigrant experience, but the story he tells here is of a white working-class family: Dennis Nash (Garfield, the most recent Spider-Man) is a builder, a solo dad living in Orlando, Florida, which is, not incidentally, the home of that apotheosis of family cutesiness, Disney World.

But he's behind on the payments on the house he shares with his mother - Dern's brilliant, questing characterisation adds a heartbreaking hint of dementia - and his infant son, and that knock at the door in the first few minutes spells bad news.

On the doorstep is the evocatively named Rick Carver (Shannon), a real-estate "broker", who enforces foreclosures. With the help of a sheriff and a dedicated house-emptying crew, he soon has the Nash family's' life piled on the footpath.

There's nothing fanciful about the story here and Bahrani shows us where it starts in a magnificent courtroom scene where a judge processes the so-called "rocket docket", evicting a homeowner every few seconds: a man seeking to save his home is pictured in the middle of a jittery, whirling crowd, the still, bewildered centre of a world gone wild.

Andrew Garfield stars in 99 Homes.

Equally, the film-maker builds on real life to show us what happens next: the desperate Nash gets work with the only booming business in town - Carver's. There's a wince-inducing symbolism in the fact that his first job, which no one else is prepared to take, is to clear the sewerage a disgruntled evictee has blocked.

As Nash, with chilling ease, is steadily more enmeshed in a pact too awful to be called Faustian, the film becomes a platform for discussions that are sometimes too contrived to be convincing. "America was built by bailing out winners," Carver says, apparently oblivious to the contradiction in terms. It's a good line, but it's deliberate moments like this that stop a good film from being a great one.

Still, Carver's predatory, reptilian performance is the heart of a deeply engrossing movie: puffing on an electric-blue e-cigarette, a gun strapped to his ankle, he's the lawman in a land where the law has collapsed, but everybody still says "sir" all the time. The final shot is a heavy-handed misjudgment, perhaps, but for most of this American tragedy, you can't tear your eyes away.

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, Laura Dern
Director: Ramin Bahrani
Running Time: 110 mins
Rating: M (offensive language, sexual references)
Verdict: Masterly American tragedy.