Critics reviews

While there's much to be said about its Ramin Bahran-ian blend of moralistic sappiness, I was more put off by its overly twitchy star, Andrew Garfield, and how an actress of Laura Dern's caliber got stuck with such a lousy, underwritten supporting role: not just "The Mom," but "The Grandma"! A subject and approach this important deserves a mulligan.

The sympathies of any sane viewer are locked in from the start; most of the movie is sheer emotional overkill. The director, Ramin Bahrani, admits of no ambiguity, but, despite his apparent intentions, his depiction of real-estate scams is more engaging than the drama. The Devil gets the best lines.

99 Homes is a ferocious excavation of the meaning of home, the desperation attached to real estate, the pride of ownership and the stability of belonging. The pace never lets up. Once a person slips below the mainstream, it is nearly impossible to gain a foothold again. These characters struggle like hell to survive.

Veteran Iranian expat filmmaker Amir Naderi wrote this model screenplay with Bahrani and Bahareh Azimi. Bahrani has a natural feel for the flavor of the South (and this part of Florida is Deep South, no matter what anybody claims). He was born in North Carolina and lived there well past the time he was knee-high to a tadpole. Bobby Bukowski's cinematography, much of it handheld, makes the facades of the lower-middle class homes and nearby strip malls appealingly colorful.

Bahrani packs the film with real-life extras playing cleanup crews, neighbors, and victims. They give the film some poignant moments, but they mostly add to its aura of desperation. The data-to-drama ratio goes out of whack. The script forces Garfield to overwork the furtive, questing boyishness beneath his can-do surface.

What makes this so thrilling as drama isn't simply the fact of Dennis's corruption but the speed with which it happens. In a deeply plausible, surprisingly un-filmic way, he only gets around to wrestling with his conscience when it's too late for the result to make any odds... This is a ripe and vigorous return to form: a timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

99 Homes's fundamental schematics and overly neat symmetries aren't a dealbreaker. Bahrani's talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.

As always, Bahrani's skill is to make us feel we're getting absolutely authentic access to these lives, and for British viewers this immersion in the particularities of the US property market will be a revelation, not least the involvement of huge government-backed mortgage brokers who, because of their sheer size, are vulnerable to wheeler-dealer Carver's chicanery on the ground.

There's something to be said for broadcasting the galling cash-in mentality of the Aughts housing-market scandal as loudly and clearly as Bahrani does here, in a screenplay co-written with Iranian director Amir Naderi. But the film feels far too cut-and-dried, right down to Mike's booming Speech About America (which was made, in case you're wondering, by and for the winners).

99 Homes offers further proof that writer/director Ramin Bahrani is our foremost practitioner of Neorealist camp... In the Gordon Gekko/Bill the Butcher role, Shannon is given full clearance to make the scenery into his own personal buffet, with predictably enjoyable results. But can't just one of these movies end with the essentially decent guy who's been tempted by the spoils of corruption failing entirely to recapture his soul?

A Moral Tale drenched in good and altruistic feelings we thought only the Pope was capable of, 99 Homes is a 99-proof Hollywood flick that embodies the devastating consequences of the banking crisis in a standard-issue movie villain—it's there to be defeated by the good guys.

The moment [Nash] crosses that threshold and joins the top margin of society (figuratively if not yet literally), despite never losing his conscience or the virtues he possesses, he becomes a pariah. A tragically all-too common symbol of modern times. Bahrani's film could almost work as a companion piece to Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street — The Lamb of Loserville.