Neil Young's Film Lounge

THE BANK

3/10

Australia (/Italy) 2001
director/script : Robert Connolly (from an idea by Brian Price, Mike Betar)
cinematography : Tristan Milani
editing : Nicholas Meyers
music : Alan John
lead actors : David Wenham, Anthony LaPaglia, Sibylla Budd
also : Steve Rodgers, Mandy McElhinney, Mitchell Butel
103 minutes

The Bank won 2001′s ‘best original screenplay’ award at the Aussie equivalent of the Oscars – which makes you wonder what the opposition must have been like. Because the very worst thing about this film is the god-awful script, an unholy amalgam of Swordfish and Rogue Trader that strings together contrivance after coincidence. Connolly deserves credit for basing a thriller on the search for “the holy grail of economic theory,” and there’s never been a riper time for intelligent film-makers to address the ruthless greed of multi-national corporations: all of which makes it all the more infuriating to see The Bank fluff the job so clumsily.

Brainy Jim Doyle (Wenham) develops a computer program that can predict stock-market fluctuations, and is hired by ruthless Melbourne-based Centabank after impressing corporate shark O’ Reily (LaPaglia). Jim comes under pressure to produce the goods, and finds welcome distraction in the sympathetic shape of low-level bank-employee Michelle (Budd). Meanwhile, the hard-working Wayne and Diane Davis (Rodgers, McElhinney) see their business fail after they take Centabank’s bad advice – a disaster that leads directly to shattering family tragedy. They seek legal redress, landing Jim with a moral dilemma and resulting in unexpected consquences for all concerned.

The topical anti-corporate subject matter calls for a mature, balanced approach – what it doesn’t call for is a two-dimensional, pantomime-level villain like uber-capitalist O’Reily, the bastard offspring of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and Al Pacino’s satanic lawyer in Devil’s Advocate. When nice-girl Michelle criticises his attitude at a swanky party, he responds by ranting on about how “this is a new age of corporate feudalism, and we are the princes!” It’s so crude we suspect he must be in cahoots with Michelle, his tirade an act to put Jim off the scent – and if this were a David Mamet production (with Rebecca Pidgeon as Michelle), we’d be right.

But it isn’t giving too much away to reveal that Simon’s outburst is 100% serious, and that Michelle is as innocent as she appears – she’s stuck with some very implausible bits of heroic detective work towards the end. Not as implausible, however, as the moment when Jim testifies in the Davis case, posing as a trainee who’d attended on a crucial loan-discussion some years before. The Bank pivots on the idiotic concept that the aggrieved couple (and what cheap use the film makes of their tragedy) fail to realise that Jim isn’t the trainee in question. The film never recovers – if anything, it becomes dafter: there’s a boardroom confrontation between Simon and a conscience-stricken senior colleague (“Morality is not elastic!”) that rivals the courtroom shenanigans for sheer absurdity.

Connolly lathers pseudo-Hitchcockian music over many scenes to make essentially dry exchanges seem dramatic, and the climax sees him desperately cutting between the Centabank HQ, where Jim’s program is predicting a major market crash, and O’Reily’s house, which has been invaded by a rifle-wielding Wayne Davis. Even at gunpoint, O’Reily maintains his free-market bravado – “There’s nothing you can do to make me give a f*ck!” he snarls at his assailant, LaPaglia exploding with such venomous force that the film, just for a moment, actually generates some heat. His efforts are much more than the script deserves – likewise, Tristan Milani’s camera, which makes subtly effective use of the buildings and spaces in which the characters move. The film’s strongest suit is this awareness of corporate geometry, the ways people fit unwittingly into the invisible, inescapable power-structures that surround them every day. “I’m just here for the architecture,” jokes Michelle – and, by the end, so are we.