THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

Documentaries are all about the editing. In theory the Siegel's would be the perfect hateful reality show family. The husband David, is the grumpy owner of Westgate, the world's largest Time Share company. His much younger wife, Jackie, is a former pageant queen with dubious plastic surgery, 8 potentially bratty kids, and a propensity for displaying her stuffed, dead dogs around the house. To top it all off. They've outgrown their already gigantic mansion and are in the midst of building a new one, modeled after the Palace of Versailles. Charlie Kane would blush if he saw the Siegel Versailles which, when completed, will be the largest home in North America at 90,000 square feet, with 30 bathrooms, 10 kitchens, a sushi bar, 2 tennis courts, etc. etc.. These people were tailor made for E or Bravo.

Indeed it seems like that's the initial direction of Lauren Greenfield's documentary, The Queen of Versailles. Focusing a bit on family background but unable and unwilling to ignore the families disgusting wealth and questionable business. But then the film shifts along with the family fortune as the 2008 housing bubble bursts around them. The Siegel's had never thought to save and now face real poverty as Westgate, built on sub-prime mortgages, crumbles and all their liquid capital is tied up in Versailles which remains unfinished and unsellable.

What makes Versailles work so wonderfully is that it sympathizes with everyone. With the exception of David, the more we learn about these people, the harder it is to dislike them, particularly Jackie who despite looking every inch the trophy wife stereotype, was once an engineer at IBM and genuinely cares for her family. Greenfield expands her scope to cover David's eldest son who runs Westgate day to day and finds himself being a buffer between his estranged father and thousands of angry employees who now face mass firings. We even get to know the nanny, a Filipina immigrant who's been separated from her biological children for 11 years and clings to the Siegel kids as surrogates.

This could have easily been a kitchy, one dimensional documentary, instead Greenfield's journalistic instincts flesh out all the right details. At times the film becomes an almost eerie microcosm of rescission era America. The Siegel's are ultimately a family suffering because they wanted a home they couldn't afford. The deeper irony that they made their fortune selling homes to people who coulnd't afford them isn't lost on Greenfield. I wonder if the footage that goes into the average reality show could be molded into something this special if they weren't so limited by a rigid agenda and the need to fill 10 23 minute slots every season.

Grade: A

Note: The Queen of Versailles is currently streaming on Netflix Instant