The Queen of Versailles (***1/4)

Twenty-six thousand square feet. Enough room for a couple, eight kids, a nanny, and assorted staff. Enough room to host a reception for all 50 Miss America contestants. Could anyone want more? Apparently, David and Jackie Siegel could. When Lauren Greenfield began her documentary, David was the “time share” king who had recently opened his greatest project, a skyscraper in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He boasted of having personally gotten George W. Bush elected president. Jackie, his third wife, was an ex-beauty queen who had borne him a new family of seven young children, though a Filipino nanny did a lot of the less-fun stuff. (They had taken in another girl, Jackie’s niece.) And 26,000 feet was just not big enough.

The Seigels’ new place, nicknamed after the French palace, would become a boondoggle symbolic of the Great Recession, and David’s attempts to maintain his empire, and Jackie’s to reform lifestyle, would give Greenfield’s film an unexpected story arc. David Siegel has meanwhile sued Greenfield over her editing choices, which he argues exaggerate the financial troubles, but all things considered, they don’t come off too badly. At least, they seem more relatable, less hateable, than you would think if all you knew was the bare facts above. Jackie, who is the main character, may not be the world’s best mother—she freely confesses she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she needed to actually raise them herself—and she may be a bit childlike herself, but she’s no Leona Helmsley figure. That is, she’s pleasant to spend time with.

In the end, money, especially money one comes into suddenly, as by lottery or marriage, may not change a person so much as allow a person to indulge the personality one already had. That’s the sense I get here. It’s probably just as true of reality-show contestants, and that’s the vibe of this documentary.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/12 7:20 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13–9/15/12

Copacabana (***1/4)

If ordinary parents worry when their children rebel, what worries parents who are themselves rebellious? If they’re like Babou, the free-spirited mother played by Isabelle Huppert here, they worry that their children’s embrace of stability represents a rejection of their countercultural values. Babou’s daughter, who has followed her to exotic locales before returning to France, now wants to marry her boyfriend and live a normal life. She’s embarrassed by Babou’s antics, like putting on a sari to serve an Indian meal, to the point where she has disinvited her to the wedding.

And so Babou, heartbroken by this rejection, takes a job selling time share in a Belgian beach resort to prove that she too can live a responsible life. Babou walks the line between being fun and self-absorbed, but as a film character she (and Huppert) are entirely charming.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/16/10