User Reviews

Generation Wealth (2018) was written and directed by Lauren Greenfield. This movie is hyped as being about the greed of modern society and what it does to the personality of wealthy people. It's not about that.

This is a coming-of-age movie about the director and her parents. We see some interviews with women who are dissatisfied with their bodies, and who than have cosmetic surgery done. We see some interviews of women who have been hookers or porn stars or both.

However, what we mostly see is Ms. Greenfield coming to grips with her mother. When her parents were divorced, Ms. Greenfield's mother left the children with their father. The got to see their mother every other weekend. In order to do this, they had to travel by plane to visit her, starting at ages five and seven.

If this were truly a movie about greed, it might have worked. If this had been advertised as a movie about an adult confronting her mother about abandonment, it might have worked.

It's neither of those. It's a self indulgent movie about a photographer who manages to hype her photo book while she tells her own story.

This movie carries a terrible a IMDb rating of 5.7. Unfortunately, it's not that good.

Generation Wealth is misnamed. It should be called Generation Lauren Greenfield because it is really her life story. If anything, it could be called Generation OCD. But ultimately it tracks Lauren Greenfield´s obsessions and pulls everything together in a kind of vanity project film billed as being about something other than what it is: a history of Lauren Greenfield.

Don´t get me wrong: I understand the desire to not waste one´s work. It is always tempting when writing a novel to put in every idea one ever had and include every surly character one ever encountered. So why not pull together film footage of everything one ever did into one work? Who knows? You might die tomorrow and therefore will not have the chance to make another film!

All of that said, this collage of an autobiographical film does end up being fairly thought provoking about each of its individual subjects, including the main protagonist, Lauren Greenfield and her family. I do feel that the scenes with the mother were an exhibitionist form of psychotherapy.

People are going to disagree about this movie. How you rate or value it is going to depend a lot on your own sense of aesthetics. You can call it complex, or murky; multi-layered, or muddled. It pulls from the projects of filmmaker Greenfield's whole life, which is certainly ambitious - many will say that it's too ambitious, and that the film completely loses focus. Others will say that focus is overrated.

Greenfield presents images and stories of excess - mania for wealth - mania for commodities - desire to shape oneself as a commodity. This content combines in several narratives or patterns:

(A) At times we are told (on several occasions by leftish moralist Chris Hedges) that this is a uniquely bad time in the history of our global civilization. We are told that crescendos of hedonism and greed inevitably mark the imminent deaths of empires and ways of life. This sense of the coming apocalypse is sometimes accentuated by musical and visual elements as in Koyaanisqatsi, say, which however did it better and more single-mindedly. I should say that I find Hedges' interventions to be kind of irritating, not because they're anti-capitalist, which I would take as a plus, but because I don't think they're particularly well grounded in theory.

(B) Mingled with this, we see that for some individuals in the work the crash has already come, pointedly in the collapse of 2008. A hedge fund millionaire became a wanted fugitive; an Icelandic fisherman who became a bank employee had to go back to his boat; other persons experienced other kinds of bubble-bursting. But some of them have actually survived and accepted their new lives.

(C) Another pattern one sees is that some of the people just grew out of it. Early in the film we see teenagers who, back in the 1990's when she first photographed them, were given to all sorts of unhealthy excesses. Then, today, 20 years or more later, they have gotten over it and became kind of okay people. This is a hopeful note, by the way. The excessive kids you are panicking about today may be a lot different after they have had a few years to mature.

(D) But also on some level the film is really about Greenfield's own life - her experiences with her mother, whom she saw as obsessed with work, and with her own kids, who have seen her as obsessed with work. I should point out here that the farther the film progresses, the more it takes the position that "wealth" encompasses just about any thing that someone is overly obsessed with, such as work, one's body, having a child, and so on. You will hear that Greenfield "has always been photographing and reporting on wealth", but someone else can say "well, sure, once you have decided to define 'wealth' as just about anything, of course she has." Apparently this film is just one facet of her opus of oeuvre compilation, which we see has also produced a coffee-table book for people with very sturdy coffee tables.

My own bottom line is that I am happy to have seen it, but then I'm pretty tolerant of ambiguity and of filmmakers pursuing their own visions even if they aren't exactly clear and don't have what you would call "a point" exactly. This may help you decide whether you will like it or not.

I generally don't review but I had to on this. Saw the trailer and was like, wow great subject! Watched the movie. The first part of the movie dealing with the commodification of america was good. Then it started to veer into a personal journey of Ms Greenfield. While it is interesting how she basically did the same to her kids that her parents did to her, it is not really supposed to be about her. It was supposed to be a comment on America. At 1hr and 45 min I thought it was 30 minutes too long because of that. I was like ok, we've reached the natural conclusion. Then it was self-serving for the rest.