Photographer and film-maker Lauren Greenfield created an instant classic in 2012 with her documentary The Queen of Versailles, in which she found the kind of interviewees that every director dreams about. They were the Siegels, the horrendously nouveaux super-rich American family (timeshare mogul married to brash beauty queen, plus kids) who tried to build the biggest private house in the US, bizarrely modelled on Versailles, before the 2008 crash left the over-leveraged Siegels in the lurch, marooned in their half-built monstrosity. The film brilliantly pointed up so much that was wrong in our society: money worship, debt addiction, celeb narcissism. By contrast, her follow-up film Generation Wealth, is a disappointment. There is no real analysis, and everything here was said more succinctly and eloquently in Versailles. This is frustratingly diffuse, without a clear focus, and is dependent on a range of interview subjects who get what increasingly looks like a glibly fetishising and covertly grotesquefying treatment, which is then redeemed with a Hollywood ending: they are finally allowed to tear up and realise – mostly – that their rampant consumerism has been awful and wrong. Tiresomely, Greenfield includes an awful lot about herself and her family, in a rather self-regarding and supercilious manner. Ostensibly, that’s so she can ask if she might not be just as driven and selfish as her interviewees. It’s a charge she raises in order to acquit herself, and she certainly never photographs her own children in the same fierce, hard, affectless colour and light that made the still images of her earlier subjects so brutal. Greenfield starts by tracking down the supercool LA rich kids she shot for her 90s collection Fast Forward. Now middle-aged, they appear to be miraculously mature and centred, thus slightly anticipating the happy ending that is still an hour or so away. A whole film could have been made about just them, and she has some comment from Bret Easton Ellis on the proto-Kardashian worldview of these spoilt princes and princesses. But these people are shelved for the time being in favour of others: a fraudulent trader called Florian Hamm who is legally exiled in Germany, from where the US authorities cannot extradite him: he has a truly yucky way of sucking on a cigar. There is also a former child beauty queen and her mom; a former porn star associated with Charlie Sheen; a workaholic Wall Street mistress of the universe; a cosmetic-surgery addicted woman – and more. Each is interviewed, each makes the required worrying impression, but says nothing that isn’t obvious, and nothing that tells us why the situation is worse or different in 2018 than 1918 or 1818. Perhaps the question is: how rich is too rich? Is it the point at which you lose it all, or the point at which you can no longer manage the addiction? Or is it when you become vulgar? Is that these people’s crime? To be hilariously and photogenically crass? There must be plenty of people who are as cultured and tasteful as the director herself, yet who are secretly as preoccupied with money as these pop-eyed bond traders and trailer-trash empresses. A frustrating disappointment.<doc-sep>Open this photo in gallery Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield’s titillating survey of America’s grossest obsessions, only flirts with economic and social context. Elevation Generation Wealth Written and directed by: Lauren Greenfield Lauren Greenfield Classification: 14A; 106 minutes rating 2 out of 4 stars In her new film Generation Wealth, photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield interviews a critic of capitalism who compares the U.S. to ancient Rome, but warns that this empire will take the world down with it when it falls. If there’s hard evidence for that apocalyptic view of American geopolitics, this film might have included more of it. Greenfield’s titillating survey of America’s grossest obsessions, from plastic surgery to porn, only flirts with economic and social context, mainly limiting itself to observation and personalization. Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few. Greenfield began her career as a still photographer, initially shooting the privileged teenagers who she grew up with in L.A., but is now probably best-known for her last, shocking film, The Queen of Versailles, about a couple building the biggest house in America. The queen herself (who reappears in Generation Wealth) is Jacqueline Siegel, the trophy wife of a time-share billionaire whose fortunes collapsed in the 2008 real estate crash. Following that film’s exposé of the bloat and eventual implosion of the American dream, this new film is a personal project and a career retrospective for Greenfield after she recognized that all of her work deals with wealth in some form. Story continues below advertisement Here, she returns to those pampered and posturing L.A. teens to find a few unrepentant jerks, but also many older and wiser people leading more balanced lives. On the other hand, another subject, a bus driver who had her entire body made over by a plastic surgeon in Brazil, is now broke and living in her car while her parents take care of her children. Chris Hedges, a journalist, clergyman and that apocalyptic critic of capitalism, suggests America’s pursuit of extreme wealth dates to the 1970s and the decision to drop the gold standard, thereby enshrining a psychology of living on debt unanchored to real assets. Television exacerbated the problem because, as several observers remark, people no longer keep up with the Joneses but with the Kardashians. Another surprisingly reflective voice is that of Florian Homm, the fugitive investment banker who eventually served a jail sentence for fraud in the U.S. and now lives in Germany. He offers his own life story as an object lesson in what money can’t buy: on holiday in a French port and surrounded by luxury yachts for sale, he told his wife to take her pick, but all she wanted was that he turn off his phone so for once they could have a quiet dinner. Still, his American son and the son’s girlfriend, also interviewed here, wonder if Homm is repentant or merely regretful. Many of Greenfield’s subjects simply replace one pathology with another. One Wall Street workaholic, a woman who Greenfield first discovered because she spent more on personal care than anyone else the filmmaker interviewed for a film about body image, has cut back on her 100-hour work-weeks. Now she is making some time to raise a child after an equally manic quest to get pregnant in middle age. The theme of working mothers runs throughout Generation Wealth as Greenfield considers both her mother’s absence from her childhood and her own repeated separations from her young children as her camera took her around the world. She may not wish to appear judgmental of her subjects’ obsessions while letting herself off the hook, but in both generations of the Greenfield family committed fathers seem to have filled in any gaps. The filmmaker’s anxiety on this score feels more like a tangent than a strong motivation for her studies of wealth: the big social picture, rather than the small personal one, would have done much to deepen her film. In the end, everybody knows what is wrong here and how to fix it. A sympathetic Icelandic fisherman explains how the hot banking job that he took during the boom evaporated overnight. Today, he’s happily back on his boat. Generation Wealth opens July 27 in Toronto and Vancouver<doc-sep>And it’s the pursuit, even more than the acquisition of lucre, that’s the movie’s true subject. From an Atlanta strip club where cash-crazy dancers rake bills off the floors, to a school where aspirational Chinese learn to pronounce essential phrases like Dolce & Gabbana, Ms. Greenfield’s work pokes insistently at the psychological spaces we hope money and status can fill. Wobbling uncertainly between sensationalism and studiousness, “Generation Wealth” might seem simply a marketing adjunct to her 2017 breeze-block of a book and exhibition of photographs. Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices. Fretting over endeavors that have kept her so often away from her two delightfully articulate sons, she binds the film’s far-flung concerns before coming to rest on a spot she’s been aiming at all along: Love matters more than money. But we already knew that — didn’t we?<doc-sep>
Lauren Greenfield, the photographer and documentarian behind 2012’s Queen of Versailles, says she chronicles extremes in order to learn about the mainstream. In Generation Wealth those extremes include: a Chinese entrepreneur who gives her countrywomen lessons on pronouncing brand names and demonstrations on how to “elegantly” eat a banana with knife and fork; Toddlers and Tiaras star Eden Wood; disgraced, cigar-chomping hedge fund fugitive Florian Homm; women attending a party to buy $50,000 handbags; and various other Kardashian-influenced consumption victims. It’s a rogue’s gallery of grasping grotesques, horrifying yet familiar, and it paints a fairly damning portrait of consumer culture. Greenfield, who chronicles her own life and career alongside her subjects in Generation Wealth, from private school in Santa Monica to Harvard, where she was a legacy student, comes to the realization that her photography work has always been at some level about wealth and status, even if she never entirely realized it. She returns to some of the subjects in her earliest work: the students at Crossroads in Santa Monica, now in their late 30s and early 40s, doing Where Are They Nows alongside portraits of burgeoning consumption cultures in Russia, where she attends a debutante ball for the children of oligarchs; China, where she meets a businessman who has built a miniature Mount Rushmore in his yard, and Iceland, to see a fisherman who became a banker during the credit boom. She treats consumerism, as she overtly states it, like a contagion, tracing its origin to the US in the late 70s and 80s, and chronicling its outward spread. This naturally provokes a few key questions for us viewers. Namely, do I already have this brain sickness, and if not, how do I avoid and contain it? “Never send your kids to private school” was one of my takeaways, but Generation Wealth, intentionally, is much more thorough in documenting and analyzing the problem than in offering solutions. One of Greenfield’s strengths as a storyteller is the way she weaves the serious and academic with the kitschy and tacky, a marriage of her work as a serious anthropologist with her upbringing in the belly of the beast. As one of her more academic subjects puts it, societies tend to put on their most extravagant displays of wealth precisely at the moment of their deepest decline. It’s reactionary. Everything that follows then becomes of a piece with conspicuous capitalism’s glitter-encrusted death rattle, both cautionary tale and Greek tragedy. As in Queen of Versailles, Greenfield’s work is at least as entertaining as it is Important. She has a keen eye for the absurd and applies impeccable comedic timing to her found art. One of her subjects is a Las Vegas “fixer,” who plans bachelor parties and bottle service, brokering commodified women and consulting in all manner of bacchanalia. Greenfield cleverly turns the camera on the fixer’s 21-year-old son, raised in “the life,” who at one point deadpans, “I’d like to DJ for as long as I have fingers, but I’m also really big into lizards.” The kid turns out to have an entire, lizard-based retirement plan. It’s magical. We should be rightly horrified by our moronic excess and Greenfield wields beautifully the Medusa mirror. If there’s one place it stumbles, it’s late in the film, as Greenfield gropes toward a prescription, some kind of solution or coping strategy for our pervasive decline. After so capably depicting a societal ill, she sort of retreats into new age-y actualization doctrine in the last 10 or 15 minutes, complete with one subject discussing the importance of self-esteem set to tinkling pianos. So the problem is relentless commodification, and the solution is… positive thinking? Greenfield herself would surely never put it quite so reductively but it’s hard to miss the subtext.