“That’s it baby, when you’ve got it, flaunt it! Flaunt it!” So
says Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s The
Producers (1968). The sentiment, though not unprecedented, was
not characteristic of the rich in America theretofore. Old money
here was nowhere near so old as old money in Europe, but it had
something of the same disdain for vulgar ostentation. Like so many
other traditional beliefs and attitudes, that one was on its way
out by the end of the go-go Sixties when The Producers was
made, but this has never prevented artists, writers, and
film-makers from affecting a similar attitude of cultural
superiority to those they characterize as the latter-day
nouveau riche, often for political reasons. I take it that
some such impulse lay behind Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of
Versailles, a documentary about a Florida billionaire named
David Siegel and his trophy wife, Jackie, who were building what
was to be, at 90,000 square feet, the largest private home in
America before the crash of 2008 more or less wiped out Mr.
Siegel’s time-share empire.
But in the course of patronizing and making fun of this couple
and their brood of spoiled children, Ms. Greenfield must have been
surprised to discover that the precipitous decline in their
fortunes had made her subjects almost sympathetic — and her movie
is all the better for it. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any
good, they say, and Mr. Siegel’s misfortune at least had the
benefit of making The Queen of Versailles into
something more interesting than it would have been as the mere act
of humorous condescension that the footage shot before the good
times ended suggests it was intended to be. Jackie, in particular,
with her pneumatic chest and shopaholic ways, is transformed from a
figure of fun into one of pathos. But condescension is built into
this kind of movie, which is what makes the sympathy, when it comes
a surprise — and something against the grain of the medium. Not
quite transformed into Schadenfreude, it lingers in the
air as a modern-day “Vanity of Human Wishes” might do, if one could
imagine such a thing in our politicized age.
Unfortunately, the critical reaction to the movie shows how
poorly equipped we are nowadays to think otherwise than politically
about such subjects as The Queen of Versailles raises —
mostly inadvertently, it must be said, since the authors are also
prisoners of politics. At our first introduction to David Siegel,
for example, Ms. Greenfield shows him arrogantly asking himself,
“Why did I build the biggest house in America? Because I could.”
Then, with a nudge and a wink he tells her about how he was
supposedly responsible for the election of George W. Bush in 2000,
though he would rather not say how, since what he did was “not
necessarily legal.” That has him placed all right. Maybe
it’s also what led Justin Chang of Variety to write of
“Lauren Greenfield’s often hilarious, mostly infuriating chronicle
of the rise and fall of one of America’s most obscenely wealthy
families.” It’s hard to think of what else he might have found
infuriating or obscene about poor Mr. Siegel’s misfortune.
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post
writes that “it would be so easy to demonize Jackie
Siegel” — easy for her, I suppose — “but by the end of the film,
with the animals dying, her house descending into unkempt chaos and
her marriage fraying, viewers can’t help but feel confounded
sympathy for a woman who so willingly bought into the American
Dream at its most perversely distorted. Attention must be paid,
even to those who so outlandishly overspent.” Ms. Hornaday’s glib
use of “American Dream” together with “perversely distorted”
doubles the irony of her criticism back on her. She doesn’t see
that “the American Dream,” at least journalistically, is never used
except ironically anymore, and it’s already been
“perversely distorted” out of all recognition when applied to a
Louis XIV-scale palace that can hardly be identified as
distinctively American.
But to me what is most striking thing about the movie is how
those from whom one might least expect it stick by the stricken
mogul. His son by an earlier marriage who has day-to-day running of
the business tells the camera early on, during the high volume days
on the sales floor, that he and his father are “not close” and have
what is essentially “a business relationship.” Yet when all his
other business associates have deserted him, he insists he is
sticking by his dad. Jackie, too, though she shyly admits to being
rather pleased that David has been to a degree “humbled’ by his
troubles — not humbled enough, some will say — likewise insists
that she is in it for the long haul, no matter what happens.
Looking on the bright side of life, she says that the “stress has
made us closer, stronger… [It’s true] what they say, when
you’re down, you find out who your friends are.”
David, however, has not been so blessed in his troubles. So
devastated is he by his losses that he tells Ms Greenfield’s
camera: “Nothing makes me happy these days; I will be happy when I
find a solution to — ” and he looks around him — “This.” The key
moment in the film comes when David is asked, “Do you get strength
from your marriage?”
He hesitates a moment and then replies: “No. It’s like having
another child.” But, of course, that’s what he chose Jackie for.
Their romance must have been a bit like Max Bialystock’s telling
Leo Bloom: “I’m going to buy a toy. I worked very, very hard and I
think I deserve a toy.” The “toy” is of course Ulla, played by Lee
Meredith, the receptionist who can’t speak English and whom Max
describes as “an adult, educational toy made in Sweden for children
over fifty.” Ulla bears more than a passing resemblance to Jackie
Siegel, who gives a whole new meaning to the expression, her face
(sc. other body part) is her fortune. It’s all desperately sad —
unless, I suppose, you have your politics to comfort you.
