94% The Queen of Versailles

All Critics (62) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (58) | Rotten (4)

"The Queen of Versailles" ought to be required viewing for anyone who blames the rich for yanking the rug out from under America's economy.

What I left with was not hatred. I disapprove of the values they represent, but I also find them fascinating and just slightly lovable.

"The Queen of Versailles" turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.

Through a clear lens unclouded by politics or blame, it offers insight into the hazardous American practice of living beyond our means.

There's more going on here than classist derision, and the filmmaker uses her footage to try to sort out her feelings.

The Queen of Versailles combines the voyeuristic thrills of reality TV with the soul-revealing artistry of great portraiture and the head-shaking revelations of solid investigative reporting.

It would be easy to look at this with smug satisfaction, but director Lauren Greenfield is impassive.

Surely more topical (and essential) now than when it was conceived, The Queen of Versailles plays like a Christopher Guest parody of the financial crisis.

Watching "The Queen of Versailles" you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Whatever their crimes of bad taste, they had it, flaunted it, lost it, and lived to tell the tale.

The pride, gluttony and inexplicable romance in the tale are almost Shakespearean.

By the end, the movie has pulled off a small miracle: You become absorbed in the lives of these people for who they are and not what they own.

In director Lauren Greenfield's tremendous documentary packed with terrific details, greed is not good. It is a slow, self-inflicted wound whose pain hits hard and fast.

A well-told tale about having to atone for sins of the sub-prime era.

A tragicomic indulgence of schadenfreude with the sophistication of a Kardashian reality show.

The result is a rich portrait.

A dysfunctional family documentary which invites the audience to take pleasure in the misfortunes of some decidedly-decadent 1%ers.

There are improbably involving human stories here.

It transforms from a mocking portrait of exorbitance into a sympathetic depiction of a family struggling with their own version of what most of us have gone through.

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