The Queen of Versailles follows David Siegel and his family for two years that encompass the 2008 bank crash and the turmoil that it left in its wake. As the timeshare king of the world, Siegel owns and operates Westgate Resorts, a venture that makes him a multibillionaire. This money has earned him three beautiful wives – and two formerly beautiful ex-wives. As the movie begins, we meet Jackie, his current wife, former Mrs. Florida, graduate of RIT, and former lower-middle class girl from Binghamton, New York.
Together, they have eight children. Seven of their own and a niece that Jackie and David adopted.
Throughout the film, it’s hard to get a read on who Jackie is. She’s bright – as her degree in engineering indicates — but she often comes across as ignorantly oblivious. Perhaps it’s the time she’s spent as a wealthy housewife that has so distanced her from her meager upbringing. However, her standard of meager is a “three-bedroom, 1-bathroom house,” over which she laments having to wait in line for the bathroom. It’s unclear how many children lived in this house, but the specter of it doesn’t cause the audience to cringe in embarrassment or shed any tears.
At the same time, we feel for Jackie, who seems to earnestly love David, though he often reminds her that when she turns forty, he’s going to trade her in for two twenty year olds. While he keeps track of where every dollar goes and admonishes restraint – in wealthy and poor times – he hardly seems to treat anyone in his family as anything other than a business associate. A few times, he seems to cherish his children, but their existence seems more to fortify him as a family man, which is good for business. The same goes for Jackie, who is thirty years younger than he and would have been considered a trophy wife during the first ten to fifteen years of their marriage. Now, she’s botoxed, implanted, constantly made-up in attempts to keep her husband happy, and, according to David, “kind of like having another child.”
However, happiness is hard to come by when you billions becomes nearly worthless, you’re forced to attempt to auction off many of your possessions, and banks threaten to foreclose on your hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar properties.
In this respect, Queen of Versailles is a comingling of Schadenfreude, compassion, and awe. It’s hard to believe how disassociated these folks can be from real life, particularly when Jackie needs to rent a car from Hertz and asks the counter attendant what her driver’s name will be. The look on his face is priceless, but the look on hers is sad. As is the condition of their home when the majority of their nannies, butlers, and other house workers needs to be laid off. And, it’s hard not to laugh at their later condition given the lavish ways in which they vomited money previously. But it’s also hard not to feel sorry for their seemingly rapid crash and David’s belief that “lenders got us addicted to cheap money” that he “was using … to buy big buildings,” until they stopped distributing it.
In part, this is true if we consider the pejorative “predatory lending” that was under attack on the heels of the bursting housing bubble. Ironically, David made many of his billions on predatory lending. In the time share business, there is at once the ethos that everyone needs a vacation – as the sales associates are told, “people who have heart attacks take fewer vacations than those who don’t” – but there is at once the seeking out of “mooches,” those people who merely attend the sales program because they’ve been given something for free (in this case, tickets to Disney World). The customers depicted in the film want something for free in order to procure something (a luxury time share) that will make them feel rich for “one weekend every other year” or perhaps once a year.
And, David is no different in his business dealings and acquisitions. He too embraced free money each time he mortgaged a property he could buy outright in cash. He then took the free money to put a downpayment on other properties that he would subsequently mortgage. Ostensibly, he is worth billions, but much of the money is theoretical and illusory. The bank has the money; Siegel just claims it in his net worth.
There are a few important things to take from The Queen of Versailles. First, ignorance, gullibility, and the desire to be rich are not exclusive to the middle and lower classes. The wealthy have gotten themselves in trouble for similar reasons and have fallen into the talons of “predatory lenders.” Second, the rich have a better chance of recovering because their accrued wealth prolongs foreclosures that would be imminent for the middle class, something that evidence by the recent report that Davis “is restarting construction on an extravagant Florida home modelled on the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.” [source] Third, those who ironize history are destined to repeat it: This mock Palace of Versailles are destined to hold the mock Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV. While guillotines are hardly public spectacles any longer, it’s fair that a follow-up documentary might feature Jackie and David suggesting that we let the middle class eat caviar…just as soon as David and Jackie “move into a hotel.”