‘Generation Wealth’ is Prime Video’s Scathing Indictment of the Rich

Amazon Prime Video’s latest original documentary is a 2018 Sundance Film Festival pick obsessed with the rotten core of American greed. Generation Wealth is Lauren Greenfield’s haunting examination of our obsession with excess. The story flits between interviews with the wealth-obsessed, Greenfield’s own personal anxieties, and a look back at an early photo project where Greenfield captured stars like Kate Hudson and Kim Kardashian reveling in the trappings of their family’s wealth…while they were in middle school.

It’s hard to boil Generation Wealth down to a single narrative without making it sound like a cliché. The story is that greed is bad, old fashioned values are good, and America is on the brink of a massive implosion. However, Greenfield uses a variety of overlapping narratives to tell this tale, making the film feel like an orgy of wealth porn set to an apocalyptic soundtrack. We meet Florian Hamm, an infamous businessman on the FBI’s most wanted list for financial fraud, and Jackie Siegel, the Marie Antoinette-like subject of another Greenfield film, The Queen of Versailles. There are interviews with people obsessed with the trappings of wealth to a disturbing degree, as well as with Greenfield’s own family.

One of the more intriguing narrative arcs has to do with Greenfield revisiting the wealthy Los Angeles teens she captured on film in the early ’90s. Some of these adults are reformed greed monsters, like the son of a rock star who nostalgically recollects how he acted out for attention or a former prom queen-turned-crystal hippie. Others are still focused on a lifestyle of excess and materialism. Some are famous enough that we don’t need Greenfield to talk to them; we know what middle school mean girl Kate Hudson is up to these days by opening up the gossip rags. These interviews alone could have made their own story, but Greenfield weaves them into the film as interstitials.

But maybe the most disturbing thread is one in which an academic explains that the root of our obsession with excess can be traced back to the United States dropping the gold standard in the 1970s. After that, wealth and money had nothing supporting it, and consumption replaced production, and appearances meant more than ever before. The implication is that America is on the verge of a disaster not unlike the fall of Rome. Greenfield’s opus suggests that greed is not good, but a disease forcing us to self-destruct.

Watch Generation Wealth on Prime Video