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Robert Connolly's The Bank might be one of the best movies to come out of Australia in the last couple of years, but the reason you've never heard of it is because it came out at the same time as Lantana and the gloriously over-praised Moulin Rouge. Case in point: The Bank was up for nine Australian AFI Awards (the Aussie Oscar) but only managed to win once (for Connolly's original screenplay) because it squared off against those other two films in nearly every category.
The Bank opens with a scene from the past - a grammar-school class gets a lecture about the importance of savings from a special guest speaker from a local bank. Most of the students look as bored as rocks, while just one boy pays attention to the wonders of accrued interest. Flash to years later, where the interested-in-interest boy has grown up to become Jim Doyle (David Wenham), a computer geek who we see peddling an unusual computer-based service to a large Melbourne-based depository called Centabank. Doyle, it seems, has taken fractal geometry and the chaos theory and turned it into the most exciting economic cinematic breakthrough since John Forbes Nash hit the screen.
His program, named B.T.S.E. (or "Betsy") can predict the stock market. The man Doyle is hawking his wares to is Simon O'Reilly (Anthony LaPaglia, TV's Without a Trace), who is both the head of Centabank and Australia's version of Gordon Gekko. Like Alec Baldwin in Malice (right down to the line about him being God), O'Reilly is evil and he knows it. Told by his board of directors to grow the company, O'Reilly has already closed as many branches and fired as many employees as he possibly can. Seeing Betsy as a potential answer to his problems, he hires Doyle, sets him up with an office, a staff and $10 million to invest. Doyle even starts dating a hot teller (Michelle Roberts), who may or may not really be a spy for the untrusting O'Reilly.
Meanwhile, The Bank has a second thread involving a husband and wife (Steve Rodgers and Mandy McElhinney) who are engaged in a lawsuit with Centabank. Using a cheap-o attorney, they're hoping to somehow pin the death of their son on the giant lender, though we don't understand the connection until well into the film. The two stories come together in the most unexpected way, as Connolly's story pits bank executives and their shareholders (the big fish) against the mom-and-pop customers (the little fish) in a morality battle (I saw The Bank at a film festival sponsored by a huge bank, which was kind of funny). LaPaglia is sufficiently oily, if not a bit hammy, while Wenham's performance is memorable enough for us to eagerly await his appearance in the next two installments of The Lord of the Rings. A promising debut from Connolly, who writes and directs.
1:46 - Not Rated
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