‘The Banker’ review: Strong performances prevent low interest rate

The Banker is a movie that both champions civil rights and the idea that making boatloads of cash through American capitalism is a fine and wonderful thing. Fittingly enough, it’s also one of the first feature-length films from Apple TV+, a service run by a company with near-unimaginable stores of wealth and which often sticks its neck out in support of LGBT and other civil rights. Beyond that, it’s also a good place to deposit a couple of hours of your time, even considering a troubled release schedule that saw it pulled from theaters and the name of the producer—who’s the real-life son of the main character—struck from the credits.

One of The Banker’s big themes is movement, not just for the cash hinted at in the title but also in the context of one’s standing in physical and social spheres. We see this in the character of Bernard S. Garrett (Anthony Mackie), a black man who moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s after realizing that his native Texas lacked fertile ground for his mathematical talents. We see a bit of it in the character of Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), Garrett’s eventual business partner who knows how to move through almost every strata of L.A.’s social scene. And most notably, we see it in the way the pair uses their talents to try to buy buildings that will enable African-American citizens to move into nicer neighborhoods that were once solely the province of white folks. In fact, The Banker is just as much a film about real estate as it is about banks.

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