In February 1977, a disgruntled Indianapolis man walked into a city centre tower for a meeting with a mysterious box under his arm. He then took a mortgage company executive who he felt had cheated him out of a real estate investment hostage, jerryrigging a shotgun to his head with wire and demanding an apology and millions of dollars in compensation. One false move from the cops and the man was toast.
This absolutely terrible plan and all the absurdities that ensued over 63 hours and under the full flare of first local, then national news coverage, are captured with terrific gusto in Gus Van Sant’s tragicomic thriller. It’s another perceptive state-of-the-nation movie from the veteran indie auteur to add to To Die For (1995), Elephant (2003) and Milk (2008), sharing their preoccupation with guns as a manifestation of American ambition and dysfunction. Beyond the guilty laughs, authentically beige ’70s period detail and news reportage aesthetic, there’s an offbeat anti-capitalist folk tale here that will strike a chord in the current moment.
It’s scary clown Bill Skarsgård doesn’t leave all the clownishness behind as the jittery, volatile Tony Kiritsis. He’s an aspiring entrepreneur whose efforts to develop a shopping mall were left in ruins when loans company boss ML Hall (Al Pacino) called in his investment. But the plan almost falls at the first hurdle because Hall, he learns, is in Florida. Without missing a beat, he takes his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) hostage instead.
There’s an offbeat anti-capitalist folk tale here that will strike a chord
Skarsgård is a treat as the deranged, desperate Kiritsis. In a surreal sequence, he ushers Hall at gunpoint through the city centre in broad daylight as cars crash into snow drifts around them, fumbling cops panic and an ambitious TV reporter (Myha'la) jumps on the breaking story. Then he holes up at his suburban flat, using a local radio DJ as a reluctant mouthpiece (Colman Domingo’s velvet tones also tee up Barry White, Donna Summer and other disco-era bangers on a juicy soundtrack). He twigs that he can use national TV to make his case, building a devoted fanbase in the process. Americans love an outlaw – even more so in the depressed post-Watergate days of the late ’70s – and many of them wanted to marry this one.
In a less showy role, Montgomery (Stranger Things) brings real pathos as Kiritsis’s stoical mark. Van Sant and his screenwriter, Austin Kolodney, have sympathy for the poor guy: living with the threat of sudden death, sleeping in a bathtub at Kiritsis’s flat, and slowly falling into shirt-stained dereliction as the days pass, he has every reason to lose his dignity and heart but does neither.
His dad, however, is a proper shit. Pacino has barely a handful of scenes, but one of them is a hilariously offhand phone call in which he tells Kiritsis that his son will be fending for himself. The actor’s presence feels like a nod to 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, the great Sidney Lumet heist thriller that was also based on a true story of which Kiritsis would have been well aware.
That story had a very different ending, though. Dead Man’s Wire delivers a couple of final twists that would feel implausible if they weren’t 100 percent true. Cary Elwes’s wry detective is a rare competent presence amid this assembly of doofuses. As he puts it: ‘What a shitshow.’
This movie is anything but.
Dead Man’s Wire premiered at the Venice Film Festival.