There is a very interesting, even mythical motel at the core of 99 Homes. It is the place where middle-class white families end up after they've been evicted from their suburban homes. It is a purgatory between the American dream and the American nightmare. The families staying here are on the way to becoming members of the vast and expanding underclass. Lots of blacks and Latinos also live in this motel of misery; they play very loud music and walk about the place with a menacing air.

When a white unemployed construction worker, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), his mother, Lynn Nash (Laura Dern), and his son, Connor Nash (Noah Lomax), arrive at this motel after their home is foreclosed by a ruthless real-estate raider, Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), they are greeted by other white and destitute families. As Dennis Nash prepares to unload his belongings from his truck, he tells a former suburban mom that he and his family are staying for only a couple of nights to sort things out. He wants his boy to return to his regular well-funded school. He wants to get his nice brick house back. He has a solid work ethic and the will to reverse all of these misfortunes. The woman informs him that she and her family also thought the exact same thing when they arrived at the motel a long time ago. They too thought it would be temporary, a week at best, and order would be restored. But once you are here, there is only way to go: down.

But a miracle happens to Dennis Nash. He is offered a job by the very man who evicted him, Rick Carver. These are the first years of the Great Recession (2009 to 2010). There are no jobs for nice people who want to build homes. The only work left is throwing people out of homes, profiting from the debris of the subprime crash, and running quick scams on government housing agencies. Nash, who desperately wants his house and old life back, accepts the offer. But here is where the genius of director and cowriter Ramin Bahrani shines: Nash must first clean a house filled with feces and piss to get the job. He does it. For $50. And the moment when he is in the middle of human waste with a shovel in his hands is the moment he makes a transition from one side of the foreclosure crisis (those who are losing everything) to the other (those who are getting rich fast). Once he has cleaned the house of shit, he can finally make the kind of money that gets him out of the motel of misery and back into the suburbs.

At once realistic and fabulistic, 99 Homes is Bahrani's best film (second is Plastic Bag, third is Goodbye Solo). The realistic sections involve the brutal and sometimes hard-to-watch evictions. People keep saying the same dumb things when they are confronted with an eviction notice: We have a lawyer, we talked to the bank, the judge told me I had a 30 days to make an appeal, you have no right to be on my property. And they are told, again and again, this is no longer their house, it is owned by the bank, and they must vacate it immediately. The law is not about them or their debts or their troubles or their feelings. It is about the law.

Once Nash begins to work on the other side, however, he soon sees that homeowners are the suckers of his society. They go into debt for things they do not need (swimming pools, home improvements, extra cars), and they live beyond their means and foolishly believe that hard work is rewarded all the time. Carver, played brilliantly by Shannon (an Oscar is in order for his performance), is actually more clear-sighted than his victims. He has a deep understanding of the economics of housing, and he is a bad guy only because he has no illusions about American capitalism. But those who do are the ones who eagerly borrowed from the banks for what the soul singer D'Angelo once called "a slice of the devil's pie."

This is why if you are a critic of capitalism, you will have to side with Carver and not his victims. There is little ideological nonsense in his head. There is a good reason for his indifference to the pleas of the evicted. They are sheep bleating utter rubbish. They still believe that the system is fair and that the law is on their side. They have it in their heads that America works for them (white, Christian, faithful to family values) and not for the bankers and their bottom line. When they finally realize what the game is all about, it's often too late. "Kill Bankers" is scrawled on the wall of the foreclosed home.

Carver's speech on the true nature of capitalism surpasses the famous lines delivered by corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street (1987). "Greed is good," says Gekko. "Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind." This is much too poetic for sober Carver. He doesn't give a fuck if greed is bad or not; he just doesn't want to be one of the millions of duped Americans who eventually end up at the motel of misery. "America doesn't bail out the losers," he says. "America was built by bailing out the winners."