Compelling story is drained of its drama
“Brian Banks” is a better story than it is a movie.
As a movie, it feels stretched to feature length with digressions in the form of flashbacks and scenes that repeat the action of other scenes. Sometimes the treatment feels melodramatic. But the core tale being told here is compelling, even if the movie is dramatic only in fits and starts.
It’s about a high school kid from Long Beach, with a football scholarship and a seemingly guaranteed career in professional football in front of him. But then one day, a fellow student accuses him of rape and the living nightmare begins. He gets some of the worst legal advice in history and ends up doing six long years in prison.
We meet him at the point when he’s out but on a really strict parole that forces him to wear a tracking device around his ankles. As a convicted sex offender, he can’t go anywhere near a school, and there are a lot of schools in Los Angeles County.
The movie and lead actor Aldis Hodge are at their best in these scenes of Banks’ postprison life. His movements are restricted. He can’t get a job. He can’t try out for a football team, because teams tend to play near schools. And every time he meets somebody he has to figure out when to tell them, “I did six years for rape, but I didn’t do it.” Who would believe him?
By contrast, Hodge and the movie are at a severe disadvantage in presenting Banks in his high school and early prison years. At 33, Hodge is only 14 months younger than the real Banks is now. Hodge has a beard in the presentday scenes and is clean shaven for the high school scenes, but you can’t shave away the appearance of fullgrown manhood. At times, Hodge tries to compensate by imitating the sullenness, confusion or wideeyed innocence of youth, but it’s like a man trying to act with half his intelligence and life experience tied behind his back.
In passing, “Brian Banks” provides a lesson in the California legal system, and it’s not a happy one. Banks turns to Justin Brooks (Greg Kinnear) of the California Innocence Project, and through Brooks we learn that California’s laws for overturning convictions are stricter than in Alabama. To reopen a case, not only does the evidence need to be new but it also needs to have been unavailable at the time of the original trial, and it has to be overwhelming.
This leads to some interesting and atypical scenes. Banks makes impassioned speeches all but begging Brooks to help him, and you expect, OK, that’s it, how could Brooks refuse? But Brooks, even though he cares, even though Greg Kinnear all but tears up as he listens to him, must keep saying no, because he knows the limits of what he can do.
At one point, Banks gets his accuser — in the film she’s called Kennisha (Xosha Roquemore, in a chilling performance) — to admit on videotape that she made the whole thing up, that Banks did not violate her in any way. You’d think that would be enough to clear his record, wouldn’t you? I thought that, too.
So, there’s real drama here, as well as interesting questions raised about human nature itself, such as why did she lie? She had no clearcut motive, so anyone might have assumed she was telling the truth. But apparently sometimes people lie for reasons that don’t make obvious sense.
Yet despite some real virtues, “Brian Banks” as a whole, is only a breakeven experience. Director Tom Shadyac’s struggle to turn a tale of hardship into an inspirational saga sometimes veers into sentimentality, with no less than Morgan Freeman (in an uncredited role) playing a prison social worker.
This movie needed a grittier treatment.