This documentary was one of four films
that I saw at the first ever Sundance London, which offered a column
of 14 features (plus some shorts programs, panels and music)
hand-selected from the American inceptive. Both documentaries were
amazing (I also saw the insanely
well-sourced and devastatingly expansive-in-scope The
House I Live In) and both fiction films were kind of limp (For
Ellen and Nobody Walks) and I am resisting the urge to
declare that experience a cross-section of America's current indie
exports. All I will say is is this: goddamn documentaries are
getting good. And fiction is good
too of course, but is it getting better?
Given the nature of the times, this
could be the last great film to epitomize American consumption and
excess. The film's becoming is amazing in itself, begun years ago as
a portrait of the dynastic Segal family, who were then breaking
ground on what would be the biggest house in the country. Then
everything went tits up. The crash of 2008 hit and their timeshare
empire, built mostly on leveraged finances, began to implode. One
asset however, began paying off: the great documentarian gift of
rapport. If Greenfield ever intended to capture their twisted value
systems or morosely distasteful lifestyle choices, that slant never
seemed to percolate. She filmed without judgement and they dug being
able to make gregarious displays of wealth while simultaneously
displaying their “human side.” And they became close. And as
the family's lives began to erode, the show was allowed to go on,
ending quite close to the date of its release.
If only all tycoons were such good
sports. It helped that they might have thought we'd fancy them
martyrs. Sometimes that may have been true, but in other cases one man's harrowing is another's morbidly hilarious. See: 1)
Their attempts to fly commercial after losing their private jet. 2)
Their attempts manage herds of exotic pets, defecating all over their
increasingly filthy house – if not already too malnourished (or
dead) to do so – and no domestic staff left to help them. The
poignancy of all this, claims the filmmaker, is that this model of
unsustainable living pertains to everyone in the first-world, just in
varying levels of scale. No one, of course, would want to watch this
happen to a middle class family. However, display a collapse
narrative in truly operatic proportions, and it becomes compulsively
watchable on many levels. And it's not just the thrill of seeing
such superficial giants fall from the beanstalk.
There were probably endless
opportunities to make the Segals look ridiculous and the family's
deficit of self-consciousness would probably leave them oblivious to
it all. Instead many choices were made that might evoke the family's
softer side. Perhaps because they were too easy a target. Perhaps
it was her documentarian duty to layer even grotesque displays of
decadence with ambiguity. Cut to: INT. THE SEGAL'S GIGANTIC-FUCK-OFF
TOWER IN DOWNTOWN VEGAS: The company's heir is galvanizing his
sales team with all the fervor of a vacuum cleaner salesman: “We're
saving lives here. The research is in, people who go on vacation
live longer.” Is this the menacing plasticity of their industry?
Or the stories they're telling themselves to morally justify their
expansion? Cut to: the impressive and affordable digs that seem to
blindside their very working class clients. Are they at least trying
to be good? Cut to: David, the Segal patriarch and company's
proprietor: “Yeah I guess I shouldn't have sold all our timeshares
on a mortgage basis to any schmuck with bad credit because now I'm
completely enslaved to the banks.” Are they victims too? Cut to:
matriarch Jackie Segal selling off her extra things (well some of
her very hefty amount extra things) for almost nothing in the
husk of their disbanded department store. Is she really trying to
cut material weight?
Regardless, I found myself cheering for
them. We find Jackie revealing herself as, well, rather revealing.
Her shamelessness, innocence and candidacy are almost disarming. She
quickly becomes the anchor of the film, maintaining a certain
consistency of temperament as our protagonist. Of course, it later
becomes apparent that her charmed life may have deprived her of the
emotional software to be anything but. On pace with our attachment
to Jackie, is our detachment from David as he declines on every
level, completely absorbed in salvaging his ruined fortress. The
third act is a sad, but all-too-expected witness to Jackie's
impotence in dealing with real-life family drama. David's familial
drives wither and Jackie is utterly lost, not at all used to these
brand new sewers of struggle and tension.
Ultimately, the characters are in
themselves about as interesting as carbon, nitrogen and phosporous,
but like all good educational shows on outer space, the way those
ingredients behave during a supernova is riveting. The film captures
such a cosmic weave of family, economics, and all the consumptive
sludge you can pile on top of it with real energy and vibrancy. Its
narrative pace would ensnare those on the strictest of Hollywood
fiction diets. One casualty of this is occasionally feeling waylaid
by segues into the real lives of the maids and surrounding people
affected by the crisis. I felt guilty considering such elemental doc
material like that a bit superfluous, but it's hard not to let your
expectations get tainted by the fireworks show at center stage. You
can't help yourself: it's a genre film with all the thrills of
the“I-can't-believe-this-is-actually-happening” factor. This is an especially powerful combination to frame all the obscenities
of lifestyle that the American one-percenters seem to so generously
provide. And the ability of Greenfield to deliver this material with
narrative precision impresses me in ways that fiction filmmaking hasn't seemed to lately. But it's the moments that you just can't find in fiction.
Moments that could only burst out of such a fevered and
thoroughly-filmed system of excess. (I dare Terry Gilliam to
conceive of something more cartoonish than a Segal shopping
spree...and this is after the
crash).
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