The Queen of Versailles began as a documentary about a time-share billionaire, his ditzy wife, and their grotesque quest to build the largest house in the United States of America. It ended as perhaps the single best film on the Great Recession.
If that and just that is not enough to sell you on this movie, then read on to find out why you need to look at one of the 10 best movies of 2012.
Our subject is the Siegel family: patriarch David is a hard-headed timeshare billionaire, a man of wealth but not taste; wife Jackie is a surgically enhanced former beauty queen; plus eight children (yes, you read that right). When the film opens, the Siegels are building what they claim to be the largest house in the US, a cavernous Florida mansion modeled on Versailles (or at least, the Las Vegas version). But their fantasy is destined to remain unfulfilled. The 2008 economic downturn hits Siegel’s business hard and layoffs at work and at home test the pampered family for the first time.
To put it bluntly, shit gets real and it’s not exactly pretty.
Given all this information prior to the film, one wants to hate this family instantly and watch their downfall like one watching a wealthy politician or corporate titan’s fall from grace. But the Siegels are surprisingly unpretentious. The couple has seven children, all of whom are refreshingly normal and well adjusted, given their extreme wealth. Their eighth child is a niece of Jackie’s whom they took in from desperate circumstances and are now raising. They are good people. Their staff adores them. Though the Siegels’ lifestyle is almost comical in its extravagance, they’ve worked hard for it and managed to stay humble-ish in the process.
In that way, the couple represents all of us struggling in this recession. Just like childrens’ story books and kids television create grand, over-the-top worlds to make a point, the Siegels’ grandiose lifestyle being taken away from them serves as a grand-scale example of how we all have suffered to varying degrees in this economic meltdown.
What makes it an entertaining film is the how the Siegels handle it. Jackie brings a surprising humor to it, while her husband isolates himself more and more. Through a series of interviews, we get a glimpse of how their downfall also affects their staff and employees at the time-share company. Spoilers: it’s not a happy ending what happens to many of them. They let their laid-off driver borrow one of their fancy cars on weekends so he can work as a chauffeur at weddings. One of their children’s nannies converts their daughters’ large outdoor dollhouse into her own room so she can have a place to live.
The Queen of Versailles is probably 50 percent schadenfreude and 50 percent empathy. We want to hate the family, but ultimately, they’re an example of you and I, albeit at much higher income level. By the end of the movie, we may not like David and Jaqueline, but you will understand them better as human beings.