Mark Reviews Movies: THE BANKER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

Finances are complicated for the uninformed, to say the least. The Banker, about two African-American men who conquer the real estate business in Los Angeles before moving into banking during the civil rights era, tries to help us understand the numbers and the percentages behind all of these deals. Wisely, the movie eventually gives up on that notion. In drama, money is a motivation, but math is a snooze.

What's important to this story is that Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie), the central protagonist, is a math whiz, at a time when his skills aren't enough to become successful in the trade for which he has spent his whole life preparing. He's a black man from a small, segregated town in Texas. The opening scenes show him as a kid, listening to financial gurus talk shop while he shines their shoes and eavesdropping on business deals through the window of a financial institution. He jots down formulas in a little notebook, memorizes them, and learns how to put them into practice.

For anyone else in this field, such dedication and skill would be enough to make that person as rich, as powerful, and as admired as he or she wants to be. Bernard isn't afforded such an opportunity, simply because of the color of his skin.

Decades after doing his unofficial homework, he and his wife Eunice (Nia Long) move out to California, where the official laws aren't going to prevent Bernard from making his career. There may not be official laws. There are, though, plenty of unofficial rules, such as how Los Angeles is segregated in a de facto way, how the loan officer at a bank won't even make an appointment with a black man trying to get some start-up funds, and how—no matter how knowledgeable Bernard may be about money and business—some people will only make a deal with him if they don't know he exists.

This dilemma puts the movie in a difficult position. It is, for all intents and purposes, about how Bernard and his business partner Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), who has made a fortune owning property throughout L.A. with the help of a banker from outside the city, more or less take over the real estate business of the city. They do so by keeping their heads down—knowing where and when they can do business, such as buying and running property in an unofficially "black neighborhood" of the city, and cannot.

For those other deals, they need a front man. At first, Bernard has one in Patrick Barker (Colm Meaney), an Irish property owner who knows a thing or two about discrimination, but when he dies, Bernard ends up with pennies on the dollar of his investments because of the dead man's racist widow.

From there, Bernard learns that his involvement needs to be official, a little cunning, and a plenty ruthless. The first step is to buy the downtown building where a dozen banks rent space. For such a deal, though, it can't be Bernard and Joe doing the talking and negotiating. They need a white face, and in Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult), a contract worker with a good memory, they find one.

The resulting story, of Bernard and Joe training Matt in the art of business deals as the pair look for bigger and more profitable opportunities, is a somewhat disjointed one. It is fundamentally about Bernard and, to a lesser extent, Joe, as they play this prejudiced system for everything they can get by being the smartest people in the room—smart enough, in fact, to know that it's better if they're not literally in the room. Bernard is in it for the satisfaction of doing business. Joe is in it for the satisfaction of sticking it to the system, and he's pretty sure his business partner gets a little thrill out of that part of it, too—even if Bernard won't admit it.

There is some enjoyment in seeing these men so skillfully and invisibly work behind the scenes, but there's also a strange kind of acceptance of this necessity. The screenplay (written by Niceole R. Levy, director George Nolfi, David Lewis Smith, and Stan Younger) is so caught up in the wheeling-and-dealing, Matt's training, and the partners' rise to anonymous power that it barely has time to ask some vital questions about and to address the troubling issues on the face of this game.

It's more about the thrill of the deception, which is a bit fun (once the fact of the game, not the numbers behind it, takes focus). It's much less about difficult part: why the deception is necessary in the first place and, more importantly, what this game is doing to break down that system, beyond two men making a profit.

The movie eventually gets there (after Bernard decides to buy a bank in his still-segregated hometown and the business-puppet Matt decides he can be a real businessman), although, by the time it does, the move arrives after even more wheeling, more dealing, and more plot complications (involving the federal government). It's obvious that the filmmakers want to make a statement with The Banker, but instead of embedding that message into the story and these characters, they simply let Bernard have a Big Speech at the end and call it a day.

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