Jackie Siegel (Lauren Greenfield/Magnolia Pictures)Anybody who’s tried to navigate the current real estate market knows how frustrating and heartbreaking it can be to find a home. It’s a hard enough process for working stiffs, but even the mega-rich, with dreams of bigger and better McMansions can fall prey to the fickle whims of the housing bubble. Whether we feel sympathy for them is another matter.
The Queen of Versailles surveys the rise and fall of Jackie and David Siegel as they plan a dream house inspired by the French palace. When completed, its 90,000 square feet of Orlando property would contain seventeen kitchens, thirty bathrooms and a bowling alley. Construction began just before the 2008 crash, and the economy plays the Siegels like a Victorian tale of comeuppance. The film is not entirely satisfying in its riches to rags arc, but it looks at the economic crisis and American values of unchecked consumerism with an eye that is merciless and critical without being heavy-handed.
In monographs like Girl Culture and Thin (a study of anorexia that became her first feature documentary), photographer Lauren Greenfield looked at what it means to be a young woman in an America where consumer pressure can be overwhelming even to adults. It’s not a stretch to imagine that some of her young subjects had dreams of growing up to be just like Jackie Siegel. The director met Siegel in 2007 and originally planned a photographic project that would continue Greenfield’s study of the dark side of the American Dream. There are plenty of shots in Queen of Versailles that can tell a story in still images: tell a the tacky oil paintings which portray the power couple as gods and monarchs, Jackie’s $17,000 crocodile boots, the dogshit that lays unswept on expensive carpets after the Siegel’s are forced to lay off most of their staff. But as Greenfield got to know these oversized personalities, with dreams of world domination and family (the couple has a full litter of kids), grandeur and delusion, she realized that still images could not possibly tell the whole story.
David and Jackie Siegel (Lauren Greenfield/Magnolia Pictures) Jackie is 31 years younger than her husband David. As head of Westgate Resorts, David Siegel made a fortune selling time-shares to people with their own idea of the American Dream, but as he begins to shed assets he fails to see the irony in how he got them.
Comfort and the trappings of wealth clearly do not buy happiness, and in fact buy a lot of sadness for the Siegel’s Filipino employees, including a nanny who tearfully tells Greenfield that, while she considers the Siegel children she helps raise as her own, she hasn’t seen her own children in years. The movie never follows the working-class customers who buy into the time-share dream. Siegel’s son, who is seen telling prospective salespeople that they’re “saving lives,” admits that the company preys on the very consumers who are most likely to fall short on their finances. The film’s first act is a tale of success, but the play soon shifts tone as the Siegels must make do with what they consider less, but which many Americans would consider a treasure.
David Siegel has sued Lauren Greenfield for defamation of character, and Greenfield may have massaged the timeline and sequence to suit a tale of downfall more than triumph. The Palace of Versailles now serves its country as a museum. This may never be the fate of Versailles in Orlando, which at press date is back on track. But the Siegels do have their little place in history; not, as Siegel claims, as a man whose deep pockets helped George W. Bush get elected, but as a cautionary tale of its era.
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The Queen of Versailles
Directed by Lauren Greenfield.
With Jackie Siegel and David Siegel.
Running time 100 minutes
Rated PG for thematic elements and language
Opens today at E Street.
