The Bank was one of several releases that came out in 2001 to take up the rather uncinematic idea of mathematics – others included the thoroughly overrated, Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Enigma (2000) about WWII codebreakers. The Bank takes up the science-fictional notion of developing a system that can mathematically predict stockmarkets – which makes it strongly reminiscent of Pi (1998). Of course the notion of anybody devising a formula to exactly predict the nature of the stockmarket is science fiction in the purest sense – the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would surely dictate that any attempt to exploit the ability to predict the stockmarket (an inherently unpredictable and chaotic system) would render such predictions useless. Nevertheless the film bolsters its idea with an impressive series of references to chaos theory, Mandelbrot and some cool, beautiful computer representations of fractals that at least wields enough doubletalk to give the impression it knows what it is talking about.

Unlike Pi though, The Bank is not concerned for the quest for the meaning of life through mathematics, rather it takes the idea closer to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), offering a scathingly charged indictment of the financial industry. At the center of all of this is Anthony LaPaglia, whom director/writer Robert Connolly turns into this film’s equivalent of Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gecko. LaPaglia sits in the midst of the film like a coiled cobra waiting to attack. And Connolly arms him with a memorably quotable series of one-liners – “You are going to work so much better with my boot against the back of your neck. It’s an undervalued management technique” and “I’m like God – only with better suits.” It’s a performance that becomes compulsively charged through the sheer predatory bullishness the film invests him with. LaPaglia is never more in control of the film than the scene where he manages to reduce the life aspiration of a man pointing a gun at him to absolutely nothing using only the power of his voice. (It surprises some people to discover that LaPaglia is actually an Australian by birth rather than an American. In 2001 he returned to his homeland to deliver two of his best performances – here and in Lantana). Up against LaPaglia is placed David Wenham (later Faramir in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [2002]), a seeming crossmingling of David Duchovny and Val Kilmer, who delivers a fine performance of affectedly uncertain body languages while allowing an impassively calm and opaque facial surface to reflect a variety of internal conflicts.

Where the film becomes less interesting is when it lets its scintillatingly on-target bites into banking practice dissemble down into a thriller. Not that there isn’t anything wrong with that, it’s just that the thriller aspect is a little ordinary and conducted without much in the way of sharp twists, except at the end. There’s no real grinding tension to it there way there should be in a good thriller. There’s also a B plot running up against the main one of a family trying to sue the bank for murdering their son (it isn’t too clear exactly what did happen) which does come preciously close to creating sentimentalized victims, but does dovetail nicely with the main plot in the latter half with a (slightly contrived) Faustian deal and a nicely sardonic end comeuppance for LaPaglia.

(Nominee for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Anthony La Paglia) at this site’s Best of 2001 Awards).