The Queen of Versailles

Or, "Cinderella, Foreclosed."

A successful documentary often requires sheer dumb luck: sure, choosing the right subject is important, and finding the story in the footage is critical. But sometimes a filmmaker starts out to make one film, and ends up making something quite different. The Queen of Versailles is one of those films.

David Siegel, the King of Timeshares, was a very rich man. When he and his wife Jackie set out to build the largest single-family house in the United States, modeled on the French palace of Versailles, filmmaker Lauren Greenfield set out to document the construction.

The collapse of the real estate market in 2008 took David's empire with it, and what begins as a story of jaw-dropping opulence gradually becomes a not-quite riches-to-rags story. The house, during the course of the movie, remains an empty shell. The Siegels, just like so many people in America, found themselves at the mercy of the banks. That's both its singular power and its greatest flaw: the Siegels do not, of course, wind up on welfare. But the story is still tremendously revealing. Greenfield has a knack for pulling out moments that will stay with you long after the film is over; the dull parts will be easy to forget.

You might wonder why the film is called The Queen of Versailles. Isn't it about a couple, after all? It is, and it isn't. Jackie Siegel is a fascinating character: a beautiful girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and eventually married one of the richest men in America; a woman who got an engineering degree and went to work for IBM yet still isn't quite the brightest pixel on the plasma display; a model who went on to have seven children; a generous woman who took in her niece and sent a check to a high school friend who couldn't pay her mortgage. It doesn't take an MFA to recognize a character like this when you see her.

Meanwhile, whenever David shows up, the movie seems to transform momentarily into Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. David is only interesting as long as he's rich. Towards the beginning of the film he takes credit for putting George W. Bush in the White House (and he's a Florida billionaire, so you have to at least consider the possibility that this is more than mere boastfulness). He doesn't quite sweep the audience off its feet, but you can at least understand the appeal, as Greenfield investigates the epic grandeur of the timeshare business. As the family fortune spirals lazily down the drain, though, David quickly becomes a grumpy grandpa, huddled shirtless in the TV room surrounded by boxes of papers.

If you think Jackie's a golddigger–and come on, of course you did–this is where she will surprise you. Partially. She's neither as shallow as your suspect nor as plucky as you hope. On the one hand, she clearly isn't going to leave David, and in fact she refuses to despair or even to raise her voice.

On the other hand, she clearly wasn't cut out for the drudgery of taking care of a Brady Bunch-plus of rugrats in house which (we learn early on in the movie) has seventeen bathrooms to clean, to say nothing of a few dogs. As Jackie herself puts it, in one of the previously-mentioned moments that will stay with you, she'd never have had seven children if she'd known she had to take care of them herself.

The movie makes a token effort to contrast the lifestyles of the not-quite-so-rich with the lifestyles of the servants-of-the-not-quite-so-rich, notably the filipino nannies and the limo driver with a secret. These make for some of the movie's most important moments, and the only really touching ones. It simultaneously leaves you wanting more and undercuts the entire narrative. 

The nanny hasn't seen her son since he was seven (he's now twenty-six). That makes it really hard to feel anything at all for the Siegels. Greenfield was extremely lucky to find both a memorable character in Jackie Siegel and a once-in-a-lifetime story in the disintegration of the Siegel empire; but she doesn't really manage to universalize that story. At one point Jackie says that if the family had to move into a three-bedroom home it would be fine; but that only makes you feel for the people who might have lost a three-bedroom home so that the Siegels could move in.