Mark Reviews Movies: GENERATION WEALTH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2018

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield just wanted to create a photographic exhibit that displays the excesses of wealth. She specifically set out to capture that kind of lifestyle in the 1990s, following a group of teenagers from affluent families who lived in a particular neighborhood of Los Angeles. The starting point of the exhibit and this resulting documentary was to see where those kids ended up 30 years later. Most of them lost the riches and escaped the attitude that can come with being attractive and wealthy. A group of guys appear to have lost the wealth, but they kept the attitude, talking about one of their high school classmates, a former girlfriend of one of the guys, as if she were a piece of meat.

As it turns out, though, almost all of Greenfield's work involved wealth in some way, especially if you expand the definition of the word. Generation Wealth follows that concept of expansion, taking us through the filmmaker's work through the decades, the subjects whom she has captured, and the various ways in which they serve as examples of excessive wealth. That's even before Greenfield takes a hard look at her own life, which is comfortable enough but doesn't hold a candle to the lifestyle of a man whose business habits got him on the FBI's most-wanted list.

The shared trait of the photographic subjects who agreed to be interviewed by Greenfield for the documentary is that they all lost something along the way. Florian Homm, the German investment banker who ended up on that notorious list, had to flee to South America, lest he face trial for multiple charges of fraud. Having faced prison time, he now lives quite comfortably in Germany, smoking a fat cigar and telling Greenfield—who, like Homm, attended Harvard—how his outlook on life and wealth has changed. His son, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with him. Hearing the story of how his father took the then-teenage son to Amsterdam to lose his virginity to a sex worker, it's little surprise.

There are similar stories from people whose tales of transformation are far more believable than Homm's, but most of them lost a lot by simply chasing the new definition of the American Dream. It's not enough to rise from poverty or the working class into a socioeconomic status that's above one's parents and makes the neighbors a bit jealous. Greenfield and a couple of talking-head experts suggest that the contemporary media landscape has changed our collective perception of success. Our neighbors are no longer the people who live on our block. They're the people whose lives are captured on "reality" television.

We no longer feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. We feel the need to keep up with the Kardashians (Kim Kardashian, by the way, was one of the high schoolers whom Greenfield photographed in the '90s and even though she remains a constant target here, she unsurprisingly is not interviewed for the movie).

All of this is sound logic, and there are moments of significant insight and unexpected horror in Greenfield's assemblage of stories about people chasing the new Dream. The movie is all over the place, seeing wealth in a conventional sense but also envisioning it as the selling of any commodity. In our current culture, person's body, a person's youth, or even the mere idea of fame or success is worth as much as cold, hard cash.

Greenfield herself seems unable to keep up with this constant assault of ideas and imagery. In a way, it's almost admirable how quickly and how suddenly we're introduced to a new concept—a new way of looking at and considering what it means to be wealthy—because our culture keeps seeming to invent new ways of selling these ideas. Just a few years ago, we would never have thought that a reality TV personality would become the President of the United States, except, perhaps, as the punch line to a joke. That's the reality now, in part because the guy on TV sold the public on his name, his supposed success, and his alleged wealth. Enough people believed the illusion.

It's all an illusion, really, and that might be the biggest takeaway here. The story of an adult-movie star, whose affair with Charlie Sheen catapulted her into notoriety, realizes that a life lived on minimum wage can be more fulfilling than the tabloid spotlight. A woman who underwent extensive plastic surgery in Brazil, where the lower price tag is offset by a lack of general anesthesia (The movie's most horrifying sequence shows portions of those procedures), gets the body she wants but loses her family in the aftermath. A woman who spent her life trying to make more money gained a child, a similar life-long goal, in her 40s, but has she learned anything from the trial of getting to motherhood?

Eventually, Greenfield trains her camera on herself, as she recognizes that she suffers from an addictive personality that's similar to so many of her subjects. It's a brave move on her part, and one that almost gives Generation Wealth a sense of structural form to go along with its vast collection of stories and ideas. In the end, though, the movie's simple answers don't justify its exhausting study of excess.

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