Movie Review: THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

"There's a downside for everything," someone says midway through Lauren Greenfield's entertaining documentary, The Queen of Versailles. The queen here is Jackie Siegel and "Versailles" is the new house, a 90,000 sq ft, 30-bathroom behemoth in Orlando, being built by her and her husband--David Siegel, founder of Westgate Resorts, the largest time share company in the world. The downside in this case? The house is only half-built, one of a litany of casualties resulting from the recession of recent years.

Her current house isn't too bad either--26,000 square feet, 17 bathrooms--big enough certainly for the size of their family. So why would David even venture to build something this large? "Because I could," he simply answers. It seems particularly apt that the housing bubble would put a halt to the construction of what was supposed to be the biggest house in the United States.

Jackie, despite the some of the antics she pulls during the film, doesn't fit the particular profile of the stereotypical housewife we've come to know. A smart student from meager trappings in her small town of Binghamton, she was at the time one of the rare women to get a Computer Engineering degree and work for IBM. But her considerable, um, assets took her to Manhattan and the world of modeling. That career eventually brought her to Florida, where she met who would become her second husband, David. It's been a life of luxury since and she's not one to let the crash rain on her parade.

Once things go relatively downhill financially, living in the Siegel house takes on a surreal quality. Having to layoff the majority of their help (all but four remain), Jackie runs around cleaning and picking up the house like a maid. Except of course, she's a maid doing all those things in a fur coat. Not being able to afford fancy dinners, Jackie makes a run to McDonald's... in a limo. When they make a trip to her old upstate New York neighborhood, the kids wonder why there are other people on "their" plane. After they touch down, she naively asks the car rental attendant who her driver's name will be. And for Christmas, despite the possibility of David shutting off her credit card, Jackie buys five carts worth of toys from Wal Mart.

It'd be easy to vilify Jackie--or at least turn her into a bit of a laughing stock. It's a testament to the film that it rarely takes that easy way out. Yes the cleaning in a fur coat and buying all those toys is absurd. But while David spends much of his day (and night) sitting in a secluded room surrounded by reams of documents, desperately clinging to the hope that his fortunes will turn around, Jackie is doing the family grunt work. When she's picking up around the house, it isn't just the figurative crap left on the floor by all her children, it's the literal crap left by all her untrained house dogs. As David is having a particularly tough time with the business, she makes it a point to have a family dinner.

All of which of course is to say that she bears the same burden that millions of other women across America must. Certainly, social strata and bank account size necessarily reframe Jackie's plight against someone who's raising a family of six in a two-bedroom apartment. But the movie doesn't posit Jackie's troubles as unsympathetic merely because of her relative material wealth. Jackie herself is generally able to keep much of it in perspective, even saying of David's financial issues, "He's humbled. I kind of like it."

Financial woes don't discriminate, but the Siegels, with their relative wealth, are at least in no desperate search to put a meal on their table. And though the movie focuses on this very singular family, the film does well enough to turn its camera (albeit obliquely) on the less fortunate, on whom mere existence feels more tenuous. One of the remaining house employees is Virginia, a Filipino nanny who left her family and home behind to make a better life of it here decades ago. She hasn't seen her children, now all grown, since they were little. She says the Siegel kids are like her own and surely they treat her like a surrogate parent, but the sadness on her face tells a different story. When Jackie discovers that one of her old high school friends, who we see on her trip back home, needs help just to keep her house, she wires her $5000 without a thought.

If anyone does come off poorly here, it's David. In spite of everything, Jackie still clearly loves him. But when asked if he gets any strength from his marriage, he swiftly and matter-of-factly says no. Their daughter berates him for not treating her with respect or acknowledging everything she's trying to do for him. That same daughter plainly believes David only thinks of Jackie as a trophy wife. Even financially, his steadfast refusal in the face of opposition to sell his enormous Ph Tower--a popular Las Vegas resort--is seen as a major factor in Westgate's money troubles.

Jackie though, ever the trooper, puts on a brave face through this entire ordeal and the final chapter in her story has yet to be written. She won't likely get to live in the biggest house in America, but--like another woman's story whose quibbles with life felt relatively trivial against the larger cultural backdrop--at least she can rest assured that after all, tomorrow is another day.


The Queen of Versailles will play at the Enzian beginning August 17