<p>The title <em>99 Homes</em> builds on repeated references throughout the film to a deal selling 100 homes that will make Carter and Nash a great deal of money. Carver and his cronies repeatedly celebrate their deal of “100 homes.” In one scene, they ride a helicopter over the neighbourhood, eyeing the homes from afar so that they appear as tiny, impersonal and insignificant little boxes—the shot reveals to us their view of homes not as a sentimental dwelling for human beings but as a commodity to buy and sell, lumped together in large numbers and bargained for in bulk. (Carter says directly that homes are nothing but boxes, and it’s unwise to get emotional about real estate.)</p>

<p>As we hear all this talk about 100 homes, we wonder, as we watch, why the title has been adjusted to <em>99 </em>homes. We await the answer to the implicit question of the signifiance of the one home that's left out.</p>

<p>Eventually we learn that the title is a foreshadowing of the ultimate dilemma Nash faces. After all the talk of the 100 homes deal, Nash learns that one of those 100 homeowners has yet to be evicted. Moreover, Carter does not have the right paperwork to enforce the final eviction. He hands Nash a forged document to sway the court case against the homeowner (who happens to be a relatable down-on-his-luck family man Nash met and bonded with before he descended so far on his dark path). What Nash will decide to do with this one out of the 100—the one that really, indisputably does not deserve to be evicted, on the moral or legal level—underlines the central moral question of the story and sets up the definitive test of Nash’s character.</p>

<p>In the end, Nash has to decide whether he can live with enabling the sale of these 100 homes, even if it means unlawfully cheating that last homeowner who really should be winning his legal appeal.</p>

<p>The 99 out of 100 concept also reflects Carver’s mindset of winners and losers. “America doesn’t bail out the losers,” he says. “American was built by bailing out winners… by rigging a nation, of the winners, by the winners, for the winners.”</p>

<p>Carver adds, “Only one in a hundred’s going to get on that ark, son. Every other poor soul’s going to drown.”</p>

<p>Carver's philosophy is that life is a zero-sum game. In order for me to win, you must lose. He feels that he must evict others in order to leave in the dream home(s) himself—and he convinces Nash, for a while, that Nash must become the evictor to escape the fate of the evicted.</p>

<p>Interestingly, although Nash seems to rise for most of the film into a position of financial security, and the danger would seem to be lessening, the film’s sense of peril only grows. The more money Nash earns, the more we fear for him, and he never seems so at risk as when he has bought the beautiful, model home with the big American pool. It becomes apparent that the danger Nash faces is the potential loss of his morality, his family and, ultimately, his soul.</p>

<p>That one in 100 implied in the title, then, perhaps does not refer to Carver’s winner, the one who makes it onto the ark and leaves the rest to drown. Instead, it refers to the fateful one home out of the 100 that forces Nash to renounce the wrong path he has walked down when he finally cannot bring himself to cheat this man.</p>

<p>In the end, that one out of 100 is the real gift, as it returns Nash to himself.</p>