directed by Lauren Greenfield
by Angelo Muredda Lauren Greenfield's greatest boon with The Queen of Versailles, an absorbing and unfailingly intelligent documentary that rises Phoenix-like out of some spotty origins, might lie in how it makes the life of two wealthy Americans seem unliveable, stressed on the verge of system collapse. Starting in the heyday of time-share emperor and Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel (who ambiguously claims to have gotten Bush 2.0 elected in 2000, but won't explain how), the film starts off--and hints at its initial purpose--as a portrait of an industrious man building himself a monument, a house to contain his every desire. A smart but not tasteful man, he models the 90,000 square foot Orlando palace after Versailles; when asked why he needs to build it at all when his current home is already enormous (although, as he points out, "bursting at the seams"), he simply smiles and says, "Because I can." But pride, as they say, goes before the fall, and the recession hits before Versailles can be completed, leaving each of David's two hands on a very costly loose end: a massive unfinished home that's impossible to sell in a collapsed housing market; and a resort industry that filled its coffers with the life-savings of the newly foreclosed, run on hypothetical money that has run out of currency.
Greenfield's approach to this material varies between farce and American tragedy, following the individual strands of David and Jackie, his partner first in wealth, then in near-bankruptcy. Though it was predictably David who sued the Sundance Channel over his portrayal in the film, it's Jackie who's less well served here. It isn't so much that The Queen of Versailles is unfair to her: Greenfield makes sure to note her unusual biography, dwelling on her early years as a computer engineer for IBM before she turned to modeling and met David. But her body is also turned into the garish centrepiece of this portrait of an overweening America that buys beyond its means--her outlandish outfits and ill-timed collagen injections a readymade symbol for how our baser material instincts sit just below our beaming dispositions and magnanimity. Jackie is a warm, sympathetic subject: She's undoubtedly a loving mother, never less than real with the enormous in-house staff to whom she only vaguely condescends. Still, she's placed in some reality-TV scenarios that feel like cheap shots, including an odd moment where she asks if her Hertz rental car comes with a driver. Whether this is staged or not, it's played as a punchline, the last moment before commercial on an E! biography of a Kardashian.
David's desperate snake nest is where Greenfield burrows the deepest, to much greater effect. The then-reigning CEO's account of the psychological make-up and dreams of a typical time-share family is as chilling as it is lyrical, a working-class guy turned Rockefeller projecting (probably with great accuracy) onto a host of working-class couples who "want to vacation like a Rockefeller." Greenfield is probing in her company autopsy both before and after the crash, honing in on David's son and Westgate VP Richard Siegel, who has a less sentimental but no less accurate way of characterizing his customers. He calls them mooches, people who will happily borrow money to rent a suite they can't afford if they get a bonus item in the mail, thus making it a deal. The critique cuts both ways, slashing not only the unethical actions of a company that banks on "easy access to cheap money" (as the younger Siegel, indignant that the banks will no longer back him, puts it, without a hint of irony), but also the flapping mouths of every average Joe who harbours a mini-Siegel inside him.
What Greenfield delivers here isn't so much an allegory for how the financial crisis was deeply embedded in unthinking consumerism, i.e., the ideology that we deserve to spend money that isn't in our pockets by virtue of living in the First World. She's more interested in a laser-precise look at the bargains individuals make for themselves in order to justify getting what they want, on any scale. It might have been nice to spend time with some of those money-strapped ex-Westgate customers, though David and Jackie make for surprisingly effective surrogates: moon-eyed dreamers reduced to amateur accountants, tightening their belts not by cutting off cable but by struggling to liquidate a hundred-million-dollar house they never slept in.