I’m always up for a funny movie, so when the Kelsey Grammer comedy “Breaking the Bank” hit Netflix, I jumped right into it. What a mistake!
Grammer is Charles Bunburry, Chairman of Tufton’s bank, the oldest and most prestigious family-run bank in England. The catch? He’s been running the bank for decades without a clue what he’s doing. He can’t follow some of the simplest concepts of banking, he blindly follows his subordinates’ advice, and most of his decisions are made so as not to cause conflict with his wife, Penelope Tufton (played by a severely underused Tamsin Greig). She, however, knows everything banking, is the proper Tufton heir, and she probably would have inherited the bank if not for the fact she was born a woman.
If you’re asking yourself, “It’s the 21st century - who cares if a woman runs a bank?”, you’re not alone. When I explained the plot to my wife and daughter (who did not watch with me), they each asked that exact same question, and the movie provided no good answer. The entire comedic premise seems rooted in an outdated notion of gender roles, but it also retreads the tired tropes of the “wise foreigner” (a homeless Irish man, played by Pearce Quigley doing a fantastic job with the weak material he’s given) and the “principled daughter” (who rejects her family’s wealth to live in poverty and try to destroy capitalism and her family’s bank). The movie checks so many filmmaking boxes in its plot, characters, and jokes that it feels like a movie made by some Comedy Committee. (It was, instead, written by three men, one of whom had written nothing before this - and wrote nothing after.)
Regarding Bechdels, it should come as no surprise that it crashes spectacularly: 1) There are actually three women in significant roles in the film, wife Penelope, daughter Annabel, and sexy-employee Sophie, but… 2) Those three women never speak to each other alone. This is a movie focused on the financial redemption of a bumbling fool who gives us no reason to root for him except that he was incredibly wealthy and then lost it all by his own misguided ambition.