Generation Wealth is a depressing and chaotic feature documentary looking at certain Americans’ obsession with wealth, celebrity and good looks. Its director Lauren Greenfield is a brilliant photographer but her film is all over the place. One moment, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer will be holding forth on camera about the decline of western civilisation. The next, we’ll see a picture of Kim Kardashian as a 12-year-old or home movie footage of Greenfield’s own family: her academic mother whom she still resents for “abandoning” her or her own personable, very articulate teenage kids, who can’t even manage to do their homework without her pressing a camera in their faces.
Greenfield grew up in Santa Monica. One of her first projects as a photographer in the 1990s was to chronicle the lives of her contemporaries: cool, narcissistic and very affluent slackers. 20 years on, she revisits them, sees what they have made of their lives and asks them to recreate the poses they struck in the iconic pictures she took of them. There is arguably enough material here to make an entire film but Greenfield’s attention span is too short for that. She crams in all sorts of other stories too.
One of her main subjects is her old Harvard college friend, Florian Homm, a Gordon Gekko type who was once a master of the universe, making millions through his hedge fund but is now living in exile in Germany and is on an FBI ‘most wanted” list. Homm is charismatic and fascinating when he is talking about wealth and greed but is markedly less interesting when he is telling us in a self-pitying fashion that money never bought him contentment. Again, teasing out his story in full would take a full film but we only get a snapshot of him here.
The same applies to most of the other protagonists including Greenfield herself. Whenever she gets her teeth into a subject, she will immediately veer off and start telling somebody else’s story. We meet Eden Wood, a Shirley Temple-like beauty pageant competitor as a six-year-old (she was the star of “Toddler And Tiaras”) but whose glittering career faded. We hear the touching and sometimes grotesque story of the Oregon-raised porn star Kacey Jordan who became rich and notorious thanks to her adult movies and her association with Charlie Sheen - but then she contracted salmonella in a horrific fashion and learned money and fame don’t make her happy either. We encounter a bus driver who goes to Brazil for plastic surgery she can barely afford and whose life unravels in tragic fashion. We briefly decamp to China to meet an etiquette expert who teaches her clients to behave like rich and privileged Americans. Then there is the hard-driving, hugely wealthy businesswoman who works 100 hour weeks before deciding she wants to become a mother at all costs.
“I noticed that no matter how much people had, they still want more,” Greenfield observes. In her own way, she acknowledges, she is as obsessed with wealth as her subjects. After all, much of her working life has been devoted to chronicling the lives of the American filthy rich. Her pictures are startling and ingeniously posed and framed but in the documentary itself, she struggles to make meaningful links between the different stories she tells. Nor does she come up with any groundbreaking thesis about wealth and celebrity beyond the very obvious one that money doesn’t buy you happiness.
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