Film review: Screening classic dilemmas in the classroom

Abstract

Move over Erin Brockovich and The Insider. Two recent Australian feature films provide business ethics educators with some excellent raw material to stimulate classroom debate. In The Man Who Sued God and The Bank, the former a romantic comedy, the latter a thriller, there are scenes which can be used effectively in the classroom. Alterna tively, each film itself is worth a full screening for the different impact it makes. The Man Who Sued God is a very funny film. The comedy ranges from slapstick to deep irony. The main protagonist is lawyer turned fisherman Steve Meyers (played by Scots comedian Billy Connolly) with Emmy award winner Judy Davis as journalist Anna Redmond, his accomplice. Meyer's fishing boat is destroyed by a bolt of light ening and his insurance company refused to pay his claim, claiming it was an "Act of God". Destitute, Meyers decides that if God is responsible for the destruction of his boat, then he will sue the Almighty, and more particularly, the Almighty's earthly representatives: the churches. And so the film, according to critic David Stratton, "targets the pomposities of church, the legal profession, the media and big business". This is a philosophically literate film; it is not a film which targets religion, or mocks religious belief. It does, however, mock the legal fiction used by business to avoid its proper responsibilities, and provokes the exquisite predica ment for the ecclesiastical authorities that if they wish to win the case, and thus prevent a huge slice of their worldly wealth being consumed in damages payments, then they must establish that God does not exist. The Bank is more of a classic morality tale, the almost predictable triumph of good over evil, which sees a young computer genius develop a software program which can predict stock market "corrections" and capitalize on them. He is hired by Centabank CEO Simon O'Reilly (played with menace by Anthony LaPaglia) to make the software work for the bank. The atmosphere of the film is dark and brooding: aluminum, glass, and wet macadam. The best scene from the film for classroom use is the boardroom debate about the purpose of the business. The debate revolves around the responsi bility the bank has to all its stakeholders as against its responsibility for its shareholders. The bad guys win the debate, the good guys make their point and leave. As critic Peter Thompson summed it up in his review on the Sunday program, "The moral issues underlying the conflicts are eternal and they are well aired in Simon's boardroom, where not everyone buys his dog-eat-dog philosophy". Without giving too much away, by the end of the film, the bad guys are not in much of a position to argue. There is no doubt that the film bashes the banking industry and this lack of ambiguity in the moral purpose of the film may limit its pedagogic value.