“The Banker” plucks an obscure figure out of history to very mixed effect. Set largely before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it tells the story of an African-American entrepreneur, Bernard S. Garrett, as he takes on racism in real estate and banking. It’s an appealing David and Goliath setup that uses laughs, white racism and black righteousness to soft-sell a tale of inequality, heroic capitalism and eye-drooping mathematics. (It’s inspired by real events that legal records suggest may be more complicated.)
Anthony Mackie leads the charm offensive as Bernard, a Texas-born striver. Bernard has big plans when he and his wife, Eunice (Nia Long), move their tiny family to Los Angeles. It’s 1954 and to Bernard the City of Angels looks like a great opportunity, despite its discriminatory housing practices. With his customary calm, he is soon walking its pleasantly green, racially segregated streets, trying and failing to buy fairly priced properties, and then trying and failing to secure loans for pricier ones.
The story starts humming once Bernard meets Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson, having a demonstrably good time). A businessman with deep pockets and a joint called the Plantation Club, Joe enters in a swirl of jazz and smoke amid a bounty of women. He makes a useful contrast with the buttoned-down Bernard, who finds him vulgar. But Joe is a relief — funny, prickly, human — and the film could use more of him. Naturally, the men join forces. And, thrusting and parrying, they realize Bernard’s plan of buying, renovating and renting homes in white areas to the city’s growing black middle class.
The director, George Nolfi, who wrote the script with several others, tries to fill in the larger sociopolitical picture while keeping the story grounded in the personal. It’s rough going, especially when Nolfi tries to make the case that Bernard is a revolutionary figure when he mostly comes across as a self-interested entrepreneur with politics that sound like movie lines. Still, Nolfi keeps swinging in that direction, stodgily dramatizing Bernard’s efforts as Eunice smiles and delivers wifely pep talks. It’s hard not to root for them even if they’re obvious and underdeveloped, burdened with dialogue that too often sounds programmatic rather than embodied.
Bernard’s dreams and the political stakes expand once he decides to take on the banking establishment. Together with an eager, inexperienced white colleague, Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult, all big eyes, golly gee and aw shucks), Bernard and Joe devise an elaborate subterfuge to buy a bank building, thus becoming the landlords to the very moneymen who deny loans to black clients. To pull this off, they turn Matt into their front. Going full-on Henry Higgins, they teach him how to deal with wealthy white people, instruction that extends from the golf course to the dinner table. Joe shows Matt how to tee off; Eunice schools him on etiquette and seafood.
The scenes of Matt’s education are diverting and overly ingratiating, characterized by snappy edits and broadly deployed comedy. The metamorphosis drags on — it takes too long for Matt to stumble toward competency, body and fairway turf flying — but it also captures the performative aspect of race. What makes these interactions stick with you aren’t their laughs, but the vision of African-Americans’ patiently dispensing life lessons to a white naïf. Bernard, Joe and Eunice aren’t simply teaching Matt how to play, dress and eat. They are also, movingly, explaining how to navigate white power, something that they have had to do all their lives.
This lesson lingers as the story shifts back to Texas, the subterfuge continues and the deals grow bigger and far fuzzier. What doesn’t change is Bernard, whose inner life remains opaque, even as the complications mount and he bluntly speaks truth to power. He remains more of a nice idea for a character, a mystery that the film never manages to crack. This perhaps helps explain why Nolfi circles once too often back to Matt, who marries, settles down, tests his own ambitions and finally helps blur the story’s focus and blunt its messaging. For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, “The Banker” spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.
The Banker
Rated PG-13 for institutional racism. Running time: 2 hours.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
