Ramin Bahrani is that rare dramatist who understands street-level economics. Raised in North Carolina and educated at Columbia University, the Iranian-American filmmaker made his feature debut with Man Push Cart (2005), the story of a Pakistani immigrant who scrapes through life selling bagels from a cart in midtown Manhattan. Chop Shop (2007), his second feature, followed a 12-year-old Puerto Rican orphan and his older sister as they try to pull together a life for themselves amid the auto garages and scrapyards of Queens. Now there’s Bahrani’s extraordinary new drama, 99 Homes, which takes on the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008 with its tale of a young man who loses his home in a foreclosure and, desperate for work, becomes the reluctant protege of the very same real estate shark who turned him out. Few other dramas have dared to address the housing bubble that ruined so many Americans, and none with the sense of personal immediacy, of real lives affected, that Bahrani brings to his story.
That’s the question Nash is left to answer as he gets sucked into Carver’s business. Desperate to reclaim his family home, Nash accepts a few hundred bucks from Carver to clean up a trashed home, and before long he’s become Carver’s right-hand man, pocketing bigger and bigger checks to do his dirty work. Bahrani has mastered the nuts and bolts of home foreclosure and the predatory, even illegal tactics that can fatten a broker’s wallet. One of Nash’s primary duties is approaching owners in trouble with an exploitative “cash-for-keys” offer of $3,500 if they will vacate and clean the premises before their scheduled eviction. Carver sends Nash around to his properties to remove the outdoor AC units and any pool pumps and snap pictures of the disconnected wires on his phone so Carver can claim the owners stole them and bill Fannie Mae. Nash gets a cut of this action, and Carver is pleased to learn that he’s keeping more money for himself and shorting the guys who help him out. Eventually Nash finds himself on the other side of the fateful door knock, evicting a helpless, confused old man with nowhere to go but the local Red Cross center.
Directed by Ramin Bahrani
