Arguably the scariest horror film of the past decade was 2012’s Queen of Versailles, photographer Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about the ludicrously wealthy Jackie and David Siegel—and their ludicrously misguided quest to build themselves a garish, 85,000 square-foot palace modeled after Versailles, complete with a grand ballroom, three indoor pools, 11 kitchens, a baseball diamond, and a 30-car garage. Versailles was a jarring portrait of the Siegels, but like Wolf of Wall Street, its true subject was the corrosive acid of American capitalism and the Roman excess of a dying civilization. Now Greenfield’s back with Generation Wealth, which tackles many of the same themes, beginning with her youth in privileged Los Angeles. Greenfield examines how the American dream turned into “a quest for fame and fortune” by abandoning “the values of hard work, frugality, and discretion that had defined our parents’ generation”; along with talking heads that include Bret Easton Ellis and Chris Hedges, she examines our sociopathic obsession with consumerism that began under Reagan and now spreads from Iceland to China. Greenfield includes everyone and everything: TV, the 2008 housing crisis, adult actress Kacey Jordan, hip-hop, plastic surgery, Donald Trump, her own career, and motherhood. But without such remarkable focal points as the Siegels, Generation Wealth doesn’t cohere; the result is simply tableau after tableau of gilded desperation. by Erik Henriksen