The Bank

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B     Extras: B-     Film: B+

 

 

IN what might be the most exciting thing to come out of Australia since George Miller and the original Mad Max (1979), writer/director David Connolly makes his feature film debut with The Bank.  This film was issued in 2001 and likely suffered from the events of 9/11 that year, but now with its DVD release, everyone can finally catch one of the smartest independent thriller dramas since Memento (2000).

 

A top bank executive (Anthony LaPaglia) is at an earnings meeting where the Board complains that though profitable, the earnings are nowhere near what they were at the same time last year, and that he needs to find new ways to pump up the profits at the company.  With no more branches to close, downsizing options are limited.  Enter a mathematician (David Wenham), who claims to have a formula that might be able to predict the behavior of the international financial markets.

 

Everyone at the bank meeting scoffs at this, except for Simon O’Reilly (LaPaglia), who decides to take a sample risk to see if the guy is onto anything that could keep him in power at the bank and rich in general.  Instead of hunting him down, as is the fate of the lead in Darren Aranofsky’s Pi (1998), Jim Doyle (Wenham) is simply hired to work for the bank.  When preliminary tests instantly produce a $900,000 profit for the bank, O’Reilly is sold on the idea altogether and wants to go full speed ahead into further math/money escapades.

 

The bank has other problems, though, when a young boy is served in place of his parents for a court appearance.  It is from the bank, who intends to take over their livelihood and life’s work over a loan that went bad, a loan that may have been made under shaky circumstances in the first place.  That boy turns up dead from drowning, putting Centabank into a position they did not need at this moment.

 

Like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1988), this film targets the evils of corporate greed at their worse, but is not a preachy political film, but a very smart, well written, well cast, well acted, well executed, well paced work that we could suspect was ignored by the media for its too-close-to-home criticisms of power and corruption.  It has received great reviews all around, so critics cannot be blamed for not supporting the film.  Connolly has a real love of film that comes through scene after scene, atypical of the quality dramas we get from Australia that are not always as good as they think they are.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 16 X 9 image is decent, offering up some great shots and a side of Australia we have not seen before from cinematographer Tristan Milani.  If you thought you had an idea of how great their cities look from films like Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), then you will be impressed by what is revealed here.  But Milani also knows how to capture people, who are at the crux of the story.  Details are usually on the sharp side, while the transfer looks like a PAL tape that was done exceptionally well.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 AC-3 mix may not be filled with explosions and pounding music, but it is one of the most naturalistically arranged I have heard yet.  There is a character to the sound here unique to all the many 5.1 mixes I have heard to date, with the music by composer Alan John being a smart, appropriate score that always works.

 

The extras include a very articulate audio commentary track by Connolly, showing how much he loves film and understands the artform, biography text on cast and crew, the original theatrical trailer, and Connolly hosting a brief piece on how the film was storyboarded.  This is all good, but it also sounds like we do not get a short film of his and deleted scenes that may have been on another (likely Australian) DVD of the film, which is a shame.  This is still better than many DVDs we have seen lately that have many extras, but ones that tend to be pointless.

 

All this makes The Bank one of New Yorker’s best DVD titles to date on all levels, which is good, because a film this missed-out on by the public deserves a good DVD and anyone who has not seen it should go out of their way for it.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo