It first appeared at last year’s Venice film festival but it gripped me just as much on a second viewing – a piercing comment on the toxic-loan slump and the bailout bonanza that appears to underline Milton Friedman’s immortal words: socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest. Ramin Bahrani – who directed Goodbye Solo (2008) and Man Push Cart (2005) – has created a middle-class nightmare driven by the powerful engine of shame: the shame of losing your home and the shame of then having to work for the person who took it away.
Michael Shannon gives a lip-smackingly good performance as Rick Carver, a predatory real-estate broker in Florida; he is as dead-eyed as the local alligators which, as he admiringly comments, never sleep. Carver smokes an e-cigarette, and its sinister blue glow is never far from his lips: increasingly the sign of a smarmy screen villain.
He is the court-appointed agent for houses that have been repossessed by the bank, because the wretched debtors (for whom Carver has nothing but contempt) could not keep up with the payments on risky loans. Backed up by armed officers from the sheriff’s department, Carver supervises that unwatchably horrible moment when these people and their families are ordered out of their houses and their belongings piled up on the front lawn in front of the neighbours.
Carver enjoys a rich harvest of misery, taking a juicy cut from the eventual repo sale which, although a bargain, will be generally more than the loan sum. Everybody wins, apart from the poor homeowners whose rash borrowings created this carrion opportunity in the first place. Carver is armed because, at the moment of eviction, those devastated residents have a habit of brandishing their own guns, often turning their weapons on themselves in an ecstasy of self-hate and despair. The movie opens with Carver cruising gator-like through a grisly scene of carnage.
One of his victims is Dennis, played by Andrew Garfield, a hardworking carpenter and builder: he is a single dad who lives with his son Connor (Noah Lomax) and his mother Lynn (Laura Dern). Dennis falls behind with his debt repayments, and duly gets the treatment from Carver and has to move into a grim motel, sharing a room with his mother and boy. But then a twist of fate means that Carver himself needs a willing builder to work on a particularly horrible job.
Swallowing his pride and self-respect, Dennis offers to work for Carver and something in his mixture of desperation and willing competence compels Carver to like him. He winds up making poor Dennis his favourite employee and confidant: the dependable guy who can execute all the illegal scams he has going for bilking the bank for phoney repairs and fraudulent fees.
Garfield’s performance shows that Dennis, perhaps like a Vichy French official coming to work with the Nazi occupier, forces himself to like and even admire Carver, to throw himself into the whole horrible business, almost to brazen out his humiliation and cauterise his own despair.
Carver has his own compulsion to school Dennis (a little like Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in the cop drama Training Day), driving him around the quietly desperate neighbourhoods, showing him how to spot the opportunities for profit in all the badly tended and tatty houses. He insists Dennis must “pop his cherry” by having to supervise an eviction himself, and really earn his money. There is something deeply horrible in way the habits of gentility persist: the evictees and evictors have a grimly insincere habit of addressing each other as “sir”.
Watching this movie for a second time, I wonder if writer-director Bahrani did not perhaps originally intend Laura Dern’s role to be that of a wife; interestingly, the script would not need to be changed much for this to make narrative sense and she seems in one scene to have a say in what happens to Connor that would be more likely to come from an outraged spouse. But the set-up, as it stands, has a tough plausibility. It’s a compelling and relevant picture, with terrific performances from Shannon and Garfield.
