I’m always intrigued when people take the wrong lesson from a situation. In one instance, a man watches his parents get swindled by the lavish comfort of Las Vegas and decides, “Hey, I should make money doing something like that to other people,” and then is appalled when a bigger fish essentially ensnares him. This film focuses on the different destructive cycles that each person is trapped in, and only one person, Siegel’s oldest daughter, seems to be the best candidate for breaking the cycle, but as Jackie’s life story illustrates, you can break one cycle then fall into another. Even though it could be easy to watch The Queen of Versailles and simply ridicule their taste and excess, I think that the filmmaker’s skill is to still portray them sympathetically while simultaneously highlighting the absurdity that their situation is worse than their less fortunate counterparts dealing with the economic crisis.