The Banker (2020)

George Nolfi's The Banker arrives as a period drama about two of the first African-American bankers in the United States, which is to say it is a film about paperwork, property, and the peculiar American conviction that a good loan can undo a bad century. Anthony Mackie's Bernard Garrett and Samuel L. Jackson's Joe Morris build an empire of Los Angeles real estate by installing a white face, Nicholas Hoult's Matt Steiner, at the front of the operation. The film's real subject is not money but access, and it treats housing segregation and loan discrimination as the machinery of the plot. The result is a movie with genuine social consciousness, though it wears that consciousness like a well-pressed suit.

The casting is Black-led and organic to the story, which is a polite way of saying the film could not function otherwise. Nia Long's Eunice exists mostly to hand Bernard his coat and his moral bearings, a spouse with limited agency in a male-centered business drama. For all its anger at racist exclusion, the movie is a love letter to entrepreneurship and the American Dream, which places it at some distance from any serious critique of capital. It wants Black families inside the bank, not the bank dismantled.

Where the film raises its voice, briefly, is Bernard's courtroom testimony about equal opportunity, a moment of direct moral instruction in an otherwise event-driven narrative. It recovers a forgotten true story without rewriting the historical record to flatter the present. There is no romance beyond the heterosexual frame, no environmental sermon, no meditation on bodies or brains. The remainder is a competent, earnest, faintly airless drama that believes in institutions even as it documents their cruelty. A respectable vintage. Nothing to make the sommelier sit up.