(Lauren Greenfield (2))
It’s hard to imagine a less sympathetic victim of the Great Recession than Jackie Siegel, a ditsy ex-model who was halfway through overseeing the construction of the largest single-family home in the United States when her billionaire husband, David, ran into financial difficulties.
The subjects of Lauren Greenfield’s jaw-dropping, frighteningly hilarious documentary “The Queen of Versailles,’’ the Siegels make the Kardashians and Donald Trump look like tasteful pikers when it comes to egregiously conspicuous consumption, sheer hubris and utter refusal to take responsibility for their actions.
This film starts out in 2007 as a light-hearted look at a wealthy family whose “reality-show fantasies’’ include building a tacky, 90,000-square-foot Florida mansion with 10 kitchens, 13 bedrooms, a bowling alley, a 20-car garage and a grand ballroom for 500 guests with the proceeds from Mr. Siegel’s wildly successful time-share resorts.
But after the 2008 stock market crash, Siegel defaults on an enormous loan for a new 1,200-unit time-share resort in Las Vegas. He refuses to give the property to his creditors, imperiling his entire empire and forcing some unaccustomed belt-tightening for a family whose regular mode of transportation is a private jet — and where Mr. Siegel is typically interviewed sitting on a reproduction of an antique throne.
Mrs. Siegel — at the time 43, and 30 years her husband’s junior — is a surgically enhanced shopaholic with eight kids, who admits she has no clear idea what’s going on with the family’s finances. Her bizarre attempts at economizing — taking a limo to McDonald’s — are pitifully hilarious. She may have switched to Walmart, but Mrs. Siegel is still a compulsive shopper.
While their oversized reproduction of France’s Palace of Versailles — bigger than a hangar for a 747 — sits half-finished and unsold, on the market for $75 million, they’re camping out in the massive estate.
To save money, the 19-person staff is abruptly cut to one very put-upon Filipino nanny. She lives in the kids’ tiny playhouse and dresses up in a reindeer outfit for a joyless, dysfunctional Christmas party that Wes Anderson couldn’t dream up.
Financial pressure mounts on Mr. Siegel and his chief aide, a long-suffering son from an earlier marriage who admits he and Dad have an “employer-employee relationship.’’
The elder Siegel keeps blaming the banks for giving him loans in the first place. Things become more and more tense between him and a childish, spendthrift wife who lets pets run wild — and sometimes even starve — under her not-so-benignly neglectful watch.
“I thought that [federal] rescue money was supposed to be passed on to the common people,’’ Mrs. Siegel says, joining her husband in playing the victim. “Or, you know, us.’’
But, on some level, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the camera-loving Mrs. Siegel, a one-time IBM engineer (before she found modeling more lucrative) whose breasts could probably serve as flotation devices — even one of her kids refers to her as “the hostess with two mostest.’’
Mr. Siegel, who recently cut the asking price for Versailles to $65 million, with no takers in sight, is suing the filmmaking team behind “The Queen of Versailles’’ (and the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a directing award) in federal court for defamation. He claims the film inaccurately represents his family and his finances.
His wife, though, has been out cheerfully promoting the film, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it makes this cheerfully oblivious, latter-day Marie Antoinette a recruiting poster for Occupy Wall Street.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com