Generation Wealth

Lauren Greenfield photographed for twenty five years. First high school students in Los Angeles; then businessmen, cosmetic surgery patients, child beauty pageants, people who grew rich in the bubble and then went bankrupt. The documentary brings that archive together. She finds the people in the photographs years later and asks what happened. She also puts her own family in frame; she talks with her mother and questions her own pace of work. Lauren Greenfield directs. Florian Homm, Bret Easton Ellis and the people in the photographs speak. It is an American production. Greenfield had earlier made a documentary about the house of a property magnate, and that film drew wide attention. The matter it treats is the display of wealth; the documentary takes not having money but appearing rich as its subject. Most of those who speak are now in a bad way; the narrative sets the rise and the fall side by side. The narrative does not stay within America; there are examples from China, Russia and Iceland. Its second strand is the director's own life, and that section was criticised; the narrative was said to come apart there. The photographs are its main material and the archive very large. Its limit is structure; the narrative scatters across many subjects and the argument repeats. Who it is for: viewers who like documentary photography and work about American culture. Who it is not for: it is scattered, long, and the argument too often repeated.