The Queen of Versailles

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Grade: B +

Director: Lauren Greenfield

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

The most devious trick pulled by The Queen of Versailles is that it spends a good half-hour convincing you it’s the one thing that it ultimately isn’t: grist for the milled masses foraging for any morsel of schadenfreude at the expense of the 1%. And talk about the perfect vehicle: mega-rich real estate magnate David Siegel and his ex-model turned trophy wife Jackie are busy living the elite life and constructing their 90,000 square-foot dream house in Orlando that goes by the working name Versailles, what would be America’s largest private home.

The year is 2007, and David is owner of Westgate Resorts, a real estate firm he started out of his garage that grew to the largest privately held time-share company in the world. David brags about delivering Florida for George W. Bush in the 2000 election and bankrolls beauty pageants seemingly so he can scan its contestants for candidates to be the next Mrs. Siegel. Most of all, he is sinking much of his wealth into construction of his most lavish resort, the 52-story PH Towers Westgate in Las Vegas.

Jackie, a 40-something former beauty queen 31 years David’s junior, whiles away her days shopping and hobnobbing. Outsourcing care of the couple’s eight children and four dogs to her house staff of 19, Jackie excitedly monitors both her Botox injections and the progress of Versailles, including the glut of adornments imported to decorate the mammoth manse.

What starts as a cinematic study of Versailles’ singular extravagance—in all senses of the word—morphs into something more profound once the subprime mortgage crisis hits and the housing bubble bursts. With director and renowned photographer Lauren Greenfield, and her cameras, returning for several days every few months, we bear witness to the gradual yet precipitous erosion of the Siegels’ fortunes, notably David’s stubborn refusal to relinquish PH Towers, now a financial sinkhole, and the devolving of Versailles from a burgeoning oasis to an overgrown, unfinished derelict.

The Siegels’ overindulgence, spearheaded by Jackie’s dizzy bliss, is foisted for farcical scorn during their mid-aughts heyday. The characters are framed in basic terms: David, while boorish, is also a self-made man and American success story, while Jackie is the superficial gold digger. As the Siegels’ luck changes, however, so too does the portraits of our leads. David becomes withdrawn and surly, simultaneous with the audience’s ironic realization that his fortune is built on a foundation of real estate speculation, selling pipe dreams to working-class couples who “want to vacation like a Rockefeller.” Meanwhile, Jackie surprisingly doubles down on the devotion to her family. She’ll never win any awards for Mom (or Wife or Employer or Pet Owner) of the Year, but Jackie—who grew up a poor kid in New York State—stands by her man under circumstances in which true trophy wives would dart for their divorce attorney.

There’s an intelligence and symmetry to Greenfield’s presentation that elevates The Queen of Versailles beyond a simple derision of rank economic excess. There’s the eye-opening parallel between David and his father, both men who ultimately squandered their fortunes in the sands of Vegas (David on high-rises, dad at the gambling tables). And there’s the film-ending imagery of fireworks exploding in the night sky over Disney World, shot through an empty window frame at Versailles, a callback to a throwaway remark by Jackie earlier in the film explaining why the window was placed in that spot to begin with.

Indeed, Greenfield won Best Documentary Directing honors at the Sundance Film Festival last January. But while Jackie attended the film’s premiere, David was suing Greenfield and Sundance for defamation. The legal basis for suit—ably chronicled in a June 2012 article in The New York Times by Joe Nocera—appears flimsy. But David’s complaint does give pause over some of Greenfield’s process. His gripe that certain scenes are shown out of context or strict chronological order in order to amplify dramatic effect is common to all strata of filmmaking, including documentary. On the hand, while Greenfield denies that she encouraged Jackie to rent a stretch limousine for a lunch outing to McDonald’s (one of the film’s signature scenes), she admits that much of David’s anxiety during their last visit to the Siegels’ home in late 2011 was due to his desire for the film crew to leave, not depression over his financial and family situation as the movie leads you to believe.

Still, there’s no equivocating the squalor of David’s TV room, where he secludes himself a la Howard Hughes during the film’s latter stages, desperately divining a solution to his wealth woes. Moreover, there’s rarely been a more provocative juxtaposition of haves and have-nots than when a now cash-strapped Jackie is forced to do her Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart but—in an act of cockeyed defiance—brings along her housekeeper and buys enough merchandise to fill several shopping carts. While she may not reign over Versailles, this queen isn’t ready to abdicate her throne.

Neil Morris

Like Crazy

Maybe they'll let us live together in international waters

Grade: B –

Director: Drake Doremus

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 30 min.

The mutual affection for the music of Paul Simon that Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) share in Like Crazy is an ironic giveaway about this post-Graduate tale of the power of love – for better and for worse.

The two college kids meet while Anna is a British exchange student studying in Los Angeles. As visa entanglements and other circumstances conspire to keep them apart, it eventually becomes clear that both Jacob and Anna thrive more, personally and professionally, while separated from each other and, indeed, in the arms of substitute lovers (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley, respectively).

Still, each are like moths drawn to the other’s flame, locked in a quest to recapture the inextricable and elusive je ne said quoi of unbridled love, to both exhilarating and corrosive effect. Nevertheless, writer-director Drake Doremus’ Sundance-winning drama moves at a turgid pace, with Jacob and Anna remaining more an intriguing concept than fully realized characters. Eventually, the sounds of silence drown out the interest we’re meant to hold in this self-interested duo.

Neil Morris

Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire

Get Ur Bleak On

Grade: C

Director: Lee Daniels

Starring: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Sheperd, and Lenny Kravitz

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Only an African-American filmmaker could get away with making Precious. That’s meant as both a compliment and a criticism.

Officially known as Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire, the film has been a runaway train of accolades since its Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award wins at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, with a final destination undoubtedly bound for the Academy Awards.

Set in the mean streets of Harlem circa 1987, it is a story of inspiration and uplift that shines a light onto a world that is both foreign and, thankfully, unfamiliar to most people. Unfortunately, it is equal parts illumination and exploitation, a prefabricated passion play as pretentious as its full title. It is not that the horrific life endured by obese, illiterate teenager Chaireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is far-fetched. You need only to peruse the morning newspaper or the nightly TV news to know that the world is an unspeakably brutal place for a great many people.

The cruel hand that life deals to Precious includes poverty, being repeatedly raped and impregnated twice by her absentee father (the first child afflicted with Down syndrome), and suffering constant physical and emotional abuse from her welfare mom, Mary (Mo’Nique). Precious’ hulking mass acts as both a prison and protection from harrowing reality, her lone means of escape a vivid imagination in which she walks Hollywood red carpet premieres and dances in music videos. Old photographs of her mother become animated in her mind’s eye, uttering the loving words never breathed by the flesh-and-blood incarnation. Sometimes, Precious’ own reflection in the mirror morphs into the image of a blond, white girl.

That Precious harbors self-loathing is painful but understandable. What is regrettable is the extent to which producer-director Lee Daniels himself indulges, even perpetuates, the racial stereotypes a film of this sort should transcend. In one scene, Precious steals and scarfs down an entire bucket of fried chicken (not exactly Jean Valjean pinching bread to feed his family). Virtually all the innocent and/or benevolent figures in Precious’ life are cast with light-skinned actors. And, without proper context, you could be excused for walking out of Precious believing the welfare rolls are filled primarily with uneducated, dysfunctional, AIDS-infested freeloaders who regard their children as a means to a welfare check to subsidize their indolence.

That segment of the population exists, no doubt. The sin here, however, is a lack of perspective. The cure for Precious’ harsh home-life proves to be her GED prep class, whose only dissimilarity with a setting like Freedom Writers and its ilk is that the teacher here, Blu Rain (Paula Patton), isn’t Caucasian. Precious also enjoys helping hands from a welfare caseworker (a glammed-down Mariah Carey) and hospital nurse (Lenny Kravitz). That would be well and good were it not for a scene late in the film in which Precious befriends another young girl at the welfare office whose vicious mother reminds Precious of her own. The message is clear and misguided: The fault lies not with government or philanthropic support systems but with those who either misuse or reject them.

It is a viewpoint born, like the film, out of self-congratulatory, limousine liberalism – quite literally in the case of co-producer Oprah Winfrey, who was so touched by this movie that she vowed to look twice at the forgotten street-corner souls she passes while cruising by in her’s. The near-total absence of men is fitting given the involvement of both O. and co-producer Tyler Perry, who has made millions dressing in drag and peddling his own farcical interpretations of African-American women.

Precious’ psyche unmasks Daniels’ pretension when she inserts her and her mother as the Italian-speaking protagonists in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women, a peculiar fantasy considering Precious reads at a second-grade level and confesses that Ms. Rain and her lesbian lover “talked liked TV stations I didn’t even watch.” Moreover, Daniels betrays a predilection for the most salacious elements of his character’s misery. Flashbacks to Precious’ rape are intercut with images of sweat, Vaseline, frying bacon, and pig’s feet simmering in a stovetop stew.

And then there’s Mo’Nique’s highly touted performance, which is volcanic and emotionally raw. Her despicable, almost cartoonish virago is also among the vilest fictional characters ever put on film (on a par with Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet and Dylan Baker’s pedophile in Happiness). Only during a late-film monologue does she finally approach anything close to a three-dimensional person, but in the event you’re tempted to view her as the least bit human, the reproving glare of Carey’s Mrs. Weiss is there to set you straight.

Precious is nicely produced, well-acted, enlightening, and both culturally and racially deplorable. In other words, D.W. Griffith would have been proud.

Neil Morris

Adam

I like to chase my meds with Tang

Grade: C

Director: Max Mayer

Starring: Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne, Peter Gallagher, and Amy Irving

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

At first blush, disparaging a heart-of-gold film like Adam is rather like pulling the wings off a butterfly. We first meet the eponymous Adam (Hugh Dancy) on the eve of his father’s funeral, leaving the young Asperger’s syndrome sufferer to live alone in his New York City apartment, a meager existence anchored by only his job as an electrical engineer for children’s toys.

Enter Beth (Rose Byrne), the nice girl in a strange town, who is drawn to her socially inept, high-functioning autistic neighbor from the moment he lets her borrow his laundry card and starts babbling obsessively about astronomy.

The narrative use of mental illness works when it serves as a springboard for examining some larger cultural or symbolic significance, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the other hand, in a film like Rain Man, it is simply offensive when used as a gimmick to prop up an otherwise mundane plot.

Adam was an award-winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where writer-director Max Mayer claimed that that his narrative use of Asperger’s is a metaphor for “the tension between all us human beings […and] the desire to connect to one another.” However, it is never clear why Beth takes such a shine to Adam, and even as their relationship transitions from friendship to physical, her affections never feel much different than those normally afforded an abandoned child. Beth is perfectly willing to enjoy the charming, childlike qualities of Adam’s condition, but she runs for the hills the (unrealistically few) times he throws a temper tantrum or manifests some other unpleasant side effect.

Ultimately, Beth acts more as Adam’s social guide dog, steering him toward so-called proper behavior until she discerns it’s time to release her pet-project back into the wild. Backed by mawkish musical cues, Mayer treats Adam’s idiosyncrasies like a curiosity servicing a humdrum storyline that also aimlessly sidetracks through the legal travails of Beth’s white-collar father (Peter Gallagher).

“I’m not Forrest Gump, you know,” deadpans Adam when Beth gifts him a box of chocolates. Unfortunately, Adam is a pedestrian film in which, protagonist’s eccentricities aside, you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

Neil Morris