Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2014

As the film starts out in 2007, vacation time-share billionaire David Siegel and his wife Jackie are in the one percent of the one percent. They live in a cramped 26,000-square-foot (2400 sq. m) mansion in Orlando, but are building one that’s 90,000 (8400). They have the jet, etc. But don’t be thinking “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” here, because Lauren Greenfield’s film is no mere gawk-doc. It’s an intimate, observant and curiously affecting work of social criticism, a detailed study of ambition and loss that becomes a schadenfreude guilty pleasure when the couple gets mega-slammed by the tanking housing market and has to downsize. Jackie, a trained engineer and former beauty queen, is warm, outgoing, and unpretentious, and you can’t help but like her, at least a little. (What she seems to be gleefully unaware of is that among the few things money cannot buy is a sense of taste. I mean, Orlando?) David, on the other hand, is a dick. Cold and narcissistic, he boasts of getting W elected by underhanded means and considers himself a victim of the housing bubble, conveniently missing the irony that helped create it. (And he’s suing the filmmaker.) Funny, infuriating, timely and unique. (100 min)