Review: "99 Homes"

“99 Homes” is an earnest little drama that focuses on the foreclosure craze during the Great Recession. It shows how the will to survive can be gradually bended into a willingness to exploit the tragedies of others for personal gain. It’s a deliberately discomfiting portrait of how the line between victim and victimizer can easily blur.

Andrew Garfield is solid and empathetic as Dennis Nash, the true-blue-collar guy who gets evicted from his house, then goes to work for the real estate mogul who threw him out, eventually morphing into his right-hand lackey and reflection.

But Michael Shannon utterly steals the show as his boss, Rick Carver -- a conniving, contemptible yet surprisingly human figure.

Rick’s a cannibal who feels compelled to justify his actions even as he’s employing his teeth to strip the bones. He’s part Donald Trump, dividing the world into admirable winners and wretched losers; part pathetic Willy Loman, so fearful of a fall from grace that he invites it; and part Blake, Alec Baldwin’s wolfen character from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” slavering for his prey.

This is a tiny picture that I hope Oscar voters will remember when it comes time for voting on nominations. Shannon assuredly deserves a spot on the supporting actors’ list.

The story is set circa 2010 in Orlando, Fla. -- my own hometown. I can remember people back home talking about seeing at least two foreclosure signs on every block, whether houses were in the $70,000s or the $700,000s. Places like O-Town and Phoenix, Ariz., were the hot spots for the real estate bubble, with overheated prices producing the most precipitous drops when the bottom fell out.

Dennis is a construction guy, single dad, who lives with his son, Connor (Noah Lomax), and mom (Laura Dern) in a low-roofed bungalow -- the sort of crowded, low-cost housing that fueled Florida’s population boom in the 1950s and ’60s. Work’s been scanty since the real estate bubble popped, so when they get behind on their mortgage payments the courts are quick to whip out of the foreclosure card.

In a harrowing scene, Dennis and his brood are summarily thrown out of the family dwelling, their stuff piled up on the lawn by riff-raff workers, with rent-a-cops warning them of a trip to jail if they don’t comply. Rick is calling the shots, though he pretends to be just the guy with the clipboard carrying out orders. The energy is real and nervy, with everyone resorting to that sort of false politeness – “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” – when they’d really like to take a swing at each other.

They pack up their stuff to a rundown motel, which houses a thriving community of evictees, all convinced they’ll move back into their own home any day now. Dennis catches a break when he stumbles upon Rick and is offered 50 bucks to help out with a vacant property that has been befouled. He possesses enough self-worth left to haggle the nasty job up to two-fifty, and Rick recognizes a hunger he can harness.

“Don’t get emotional about real estate,” Rick intones. “They’re boxes.”

Soon enough, Dennis himself is the one holding the clipboard, running his own crews, talking people into easing their keys into his hand, waving in the police to strong-arm it when required. Rick shows him how to work the grayish angles between private commerce and government subsidy, snagging whopping checks from Fannie Mae by covertly shuffling around appliances and AC’s.

(Air conditioning, for those not in the know, is practically a religion in the Sunshine State, and all must tithe.)

Written (along with Amir Naderi) and directed by Ramin Bahrani, “99 Homes” gets a bit fat in the second half, as the plot plays out its preordained contretemps between diabolical mentor and soul-searching mentee. But it manages to powerfully illustrate the human toll of the foreclose-and-flip game, just as we’ve started to forget the shenanigans and, thereby, open the door to them again.

Review: "Safe Haven"

It's hard to believe that just a few years ago the phrase "based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks" would've produced only shrugs from most moviegoers. But then "The Notebook" blew up in 2004, making of stars out of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and creating a burning desire in Hollywood to adapt other books from Sparks' Southern-fried romantic/drama oeuvre.

But here's the thing: there hasn't really been a good movie based on his material since. "Nights in Rodanthe" disappeared without a trace. "Dear John" was a dirge-like bummer, and "The Last Song" and "The Lucky One" were ill-fated coming-of-age projects for tween stars Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron.

Critics hated them, but they had respectable box office tallies for low-budget films, so along comes "Safe Haven" as the next in the Sparks line.

Like "Dear John" it was directed by Lasse Hallström, thrice an Oscar nominee and the rare European filmmaker who seems to embrace the more saccharine aspects of Hollywood moviemaking, at his own peril.

The result is a great-looking, sun-dappled story about life on the North Carolina coast that's also devoid of much dramatic or emotional heft.

It's about a woman on the run, hiding out from the law after being accused of a brutal, bloody murder. Needless to say, she falls in love with a local dreamboat, starts putting down roots and feeling secure before her haunted past shows up on her adopted doorstep.

A big part of the movie's problem is Julianne Hough in the lead role. The "Dancing with the Stars" star has mostly done song-and-dance pictures like "Footloose" and "Rock of Ages," and simply doesn't possess the sort of dramatic acting tools for a part like this.

We know from the get-go that Katie was an abused woman who went on the lam after stabbing her attacker, so the screenplay (by Leslie Bohem and Dana Stevens) requires her to go through some pretty major transformations -- from self-doubting victim to new gal in town coming out of her shell to strong, resourceful woman ready to take the next steps in life.

But Hough's placid exterior is more shy cheerleader than woman rising up.

Josh Duhamel is better as Alex, who runs Ryan's Port Market in Southport, N.C. He's a young single dad raising two moppets after cancer took his wife. He's been keeping his head down, he says, just trying to make a life for his kids, and when he falls for Katie it's like lifting his head up again for the first time.

Noah Lomax plays Josh, who's on the cusp of adolescence and testing his dad, the self-appointed protector of his mother's memory. Mimi Kirkland as Lexie reaches a level of adorableness heretofore unseen in cinematic children.

Katie gets a waitressing job at Ivan's, the local seafood shack, and begins a tenuous friendship with her neighbor Jo (Cobie Smulders). When Alex, noticing that Katie trudges daily from her remote cottage to the shoreline every day, gives her an old bicycle, it's Jo who instructs her that refusing gifts south of the Mason-Dixon line is a no-no -- particularly not from wounded widowers who somehow find the time to keep their abs sculpted.

The story keeps shifting back to Tierney (a creepily effective David Lyons), the Boston detective who treats tracking down Katie as much more than a standard domestic murder case. "Nobody is innocent," he insists. "We bring 'em in, and the other guy sorts 'em out."

Things lead to a fairly predictable place, and an outcome that is never truly in doubt. Naysayers may dismiss Sparks' books as pap for undiscriminating mass consumption, but I think there's the bones of a good story in "Safe Haven." It just needed a different cast and crew to find it.

2 stars out of four