FOX Beat: Laura Dern, Michael Shannon star in ’99 Homes’

All Rick’s money can’t hide the fact that he doesn’t look well, though, as if he’s rotting from the inside.

Nobody will mistake Ramin Bahrani’s superbly acted hard-times morality play 99 Homes for betraying the Hays ideal. Set in the Orlando, Fla., suburbs, Bahrani plunges into the ugly, contentious dramas of foreclosure.

He’s aided in that regard by a top-shelf cast that so fully inhabit their parts that “99 Homes” sizzles at times with the searing honesty of a documentary, while rocketing forward at others with the pedal-to-the-metal momentum of a thriller. He’s just annoyed: He has to change the number again? A heartbreaking montage of homeowners being evicted – from careworn parents with small children clinging to them to a confused octogenarian who has no family, nowhere else to go – is one of the most powerful moments of any movie in recent memory.

It also can’t keep Bahrani – the rare filmmaker with the brains to match his ambition – from honing, and maintaining, a razor-sharp dramatic edge that stands not just to entertain viewers but to open their eyes.

Shannon’s shark of a character personifies a most cynical version of the American Dream. There’s power in these images, even as Bahrani eschews the Scorsese route of examining crime’s allurements.

99 Homes is a melodrama of the topical kind. It’s not what many would call an “honest living”, although it is unclear if it is outright illegal.

Yet it’s still a film of stature and power, one whose sympathies are with the victims. The confrontation is ugly, grueling, compelling in its detailed nastiness. In response, the family – including Laura Dern as Nash’s mother – spins out helpless promises and furious insistences: There’s been a mistake; come back after we talk to our lawyers; you’re trespassing; and – finally, desperately – but this is our home.

Carver pulls Nash – and the audience – into the world of real estate, evictions and house-flipping. Garfield is excellent in these scenes, making clear in each moment Nash’s pain, kindness, and self-loathing. Likewise, Nash’s son (Noah Lomax) is only there to serve as motivation for his struggle.

The rawness of the scenecraft belies the precise plotting-out of moral dilemmas. For good measure, Michael Shannon’s Carver is downright satanic is the sense that he is never not sulferous, but also just alluring enough to understand why a man like Nash would allow himself to fall in with him. He’s vile, and Nash knows it. But Faustian, despairing circumstances soon lead Nash into Carver’s employment, first as a handyman, then as a manager, then finally as a fellow evictor. That’s Rick Carver, a real-estate mogul who’s grown rich by flipping foreclosed properties. Shannon dominates the film, but this isn’t one of his unknowable inhumans, like that self-flagellating federal agent on Boardwalk Empire.

And I mean “willing to do anything”, even go to work for the very man, Carver, who evicted him.

Director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo, Man Push Cart, At Any Price, Chop Shop), who co-wrote the story with Bahareh Azimi and the screenplay with Amir Naderi, is not interested in subtlety or subtext. We saw how much of the responsibility he held for his mom and son’s well-being but that doesn’t make his slow, slippery slope descent into Carver’s clutches any less upsetting.