The Bank
With David Wenham and Anthony LaPaglia
Written and directed by Robert Connolly
In major cinemas from September 6.
REVIEWED BY SEAN HEALY
"Taut psychological thrillers" are two bob a dozen. So are ones with a nasty rich businessperson as prime villain. But films which read like they are straight from an activists' handbook on the evils of global finance are rarer.
The opening scene of The Bank, the new Australian film written and directed by first-timer Robert Connolly, shows a bank manager scaring a class of 10-year-olds with the prospect of an old age without savings.
The second scene features Simon O'Reily (played by Anthony LaPaglia), the slicked-back US CEO of Centabank, being grilled by his board over why returns are down from 16% to 8%.
Last year, we cut a third of our staff, which is why returns were so high, says Simon. Well, this year we want 20% and 24% next year, the chairperson replies. Prepare a study on sacking another third, Simon then tells his flunkies.
It goes on from there. In one pivotal scene, Simon explains the power of finance over government, over society, over everything: "We've now entered the age of corporate feudalism and we are the new princes". ("Bastards without borders", comes the rejoinder.)
In another, Simon tells the board, which is now asking questions about his ruthlessness, "The shareholders are our people, they are our society. The public can look after itself."
The story is a straight-forward two-track.
On one track, we have Jim Doyle (played by David Wenham), a computer geek/maths genius who thinks that he's come up with a way to predict the movements of the stock market using chaos theory.
Full of naive idealism, Doyle pitches the idea at the bank ("If we could predict the next stock market crash, the suffering that could be avoided would be huge!"). The bank's executives think he's a "wanker" but, realising the potential, take him on.
On the other track, we have Wayne and Diane Davis (Steve Rodgers and Mandy McElhinney), a couple who own a small boat hire business in country Victoria and whose lives go from difficult to tragic when Centabank forecloses on them.
They take the bank to court, only to find themselves frustrated by its resources and perfidy.
As they do in such films, the two tracks eventually meet. And, without spoiling the ending, I can tell you that, yes, the bank gets its come-uppance (as evil always does on screen).
The Bank is a gleefully anti-bank film from start to finish, one which enjoys sinking the boot in. This is anti-capitalist propaganda — which is a good thing if you ask me, a refreshing change from what we normally have shoved down our throats.
It's all there: branch closures, staff sackings, arseholes in suits, tricky loans (Wayne and Diane are done in by a loan they took out in Swiss francs, without being told about currency risk), even the IMF gets a negative mention.
What is most interest is that a film like this gets made at all. There's obviously a market out there to be catered for.
Film representations of popular anti-business sentiment aren't new. Wall Street appeared in response to the "greed is good" 1980s (the film popularised that line).
But many such films present business nastiness as an abuse of the "system", which eventually corrects itself. In Wall Street, for example, villain Gordon Gekko gets his just desserts at the hands of the "system", in the form of the Securities and Exchange Commission (a scenario which I'm sure had real Wall Street bankers rolling in the aisles).
In this film, there is not even a hint of a self-correcting system, no mention of the regulators, no fear of government, "the law" is no obstacle.
Rather, the come-uppance is from below, rather than above.
What you come out with, besides an even stronger hatred of banks, is not faith in "the system", but a desire to wreak revenge yourself — a sentiment which is again straight out of the activists' handbook.
Go and see it, and revel in the sense that, when such ideas get screenplay, something is changing.