THE BANKER
★★★
Is the first movie on Apple+ worth your itime?
DIRECTOR George Nolfi
CAST Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Hoult, Anthony Mackie, Nia Long
PLOT In 1960s America, two African-american businessmen — Bernard Garrett (Mackie) and Joe Morris (Jackson) — see an opportunity to buy a bank in Garrett’s deeply racist Texan hometown. The catch: to succeed, they need to use a dimwitted white guy (Hoult) as their front. Complications soon arise, with potentially serious implications…
ON PAPER, THE Banker was a banker. As a film highlighting a little-known but very relevant true story about two Black men who used their smarts to outwit the American banking system, starring two bona-fide, Marvel-approved leading men, it seemed tailor-made to make a splash during Oscar season. And when Apple picked up the movie as their first big distribution deal, it seemed a guarantee of future success.
Why, then, has it come to this? A theatrical release in the States a couple of weeks ago that would have been a whisper even by precoronavirus standards, followed by a wide release on Apple TV+ that arrived with little fanfare? The answer, partially, seems to lie in off-screen allegations about misconduct on the part of one of Bernard Garrett’s family members. Sadly, though, the real truth is that The Banker, while decent and well-made and stirring in certain moments, just wasn’t good enough to make a dent in Oscar.
In a world where a film like the charming but problematic Green Book, which also explored the racial divide in 1960s America, can win the Best Picture Oscar, that would seem to be especially damning of The Banker. But for all its faults, Green Book was an unashamed crowdpleaser. Without giving anything away about a story that’s a matter of public record, The Banker isn’t looking for the easy win or the punch-theair ending. It’s a more complex treatment of a more complicated story, and co-writer/director George Nolfi’s pronounced emphasis on the low-key, while admirable, doesn’t always result in dramatic fireworks.
Instead, this is a movie that takes place almost entirely in long conversations about finicky finances, as Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), and their frontman Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult), discuss the best way to get a seat at the table in a system and society that, with the Civil Rights Movement
yet to have a huge impact, wouldn’t even allow Black people to be part of the conversation. That, in itself, is not a bad thing, even if the dialogue rarely leaps off the page. But as the stakes get higher, and the screws begin to tighten on our heroes, Nolfi — who previously directed The Adjustment Bureau and the middling Bruce Lee biopic-of-sorts, Birth Of The Dragon — stages proceedings in such a drab, formal, perfunctory way that the audience is never truly clued up on how bad things might get for Garrett and Morris should their bold gambit start to fall apart. Even his excellent cast, perhaps straitjacketed by all the fiscal gobbledegook, struggle to get the point across.
Which is a shame, as the central trio of Mackie, Jackson and Hoult are otherwise excellent. Hoult, as the face of the operation who starts to fancy himself as the brains, makes good use of his innate likeability to bring layers and depth to a role that could have been a fairly two-dimensional backstabber. As Garrett, the genius-level mathematician who is the real brains of the operation, Mackie perhaps succeeds a little too well in subsuming his natural charisma and energy beneath tailored suits, glasses, and an air of grim determination, but manages to show us enough glimpses of his humanity to make us care. And then there’s Jackson, having as much fun as he’s had in ages as the swaggering Morris, something that can’t simply be put down to the film’s lengthy trip to golf courses (where Steiner is taught to play the game in quadruple-quick time).
Joe Morris is the kind of old swinger who delights in upending expectations, pushing buttons and upsetting the apple cart. He’s an irascible, ever-cackling presence, and when it’s just him and Garrett bonding and growing and reacting to the oppression of Black people in very different ways, The Banker works. It’s also strong on the various indignities suffered by
Black people then (and, let’s face it, now), ranging from openly racist old ladies refusing to believe that a young Black man could ever own the building in which she lives, to the more insidious kind; that of monied, powerful white men, insulated and inured by their position and privilege, reacting to the rise of a new generation of competition with barely disguised hostility. Especially when that competition immediately starts using their newfound financial muscle to give loans to Black-owned businesses, and level a hideously lopsided playing field just that little bit more.
Some of those scenes will make your blood boil. And, in the hands of a more assured director, the film would have built to a satisfying crescendo of righteous fury. As it is, the second half fizzles where it should have fizzed. Your interest rate may drop sharply. CHRIS HEWITT