Movie Review: 'Dead Man's Wire'

Gus Van Sant reads today's pulse with a movie drawn from events a half-century ago

With Dead Man’s Wire — a film about a real-life hostage situation that the nation witnessed taking place in real time in early 1977 — director Gus Van Sant touches lightly on male-to-male eroticism, with the slightest tinge of BDSM. Those elements are less pronounced than the dark humor Van Sant and his two leading men, Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery, bring to the picture, and they in no way displace the fundamental trauma of the event, in which an angry, struggling businessman named Tony Kiritsis took lending company executive Richard Hall prisoner, rigging up a “dead man’s wire” such that if Kiritsis were to be killed (or Hall to stumble or try to run), the trigger of a shotgun pressed to his head would be pulled.

(Dacre Montgomery and Bill Skarsgård in Dead Man’s Wire. Row K)

Kiritsis’ beef? Meridian Mortgage Company, he claimed, had sabotaged his business deals to create a new shopping center, putting him in the impossible bind of not being able to turn a profit from land he owned while forcing him into interest-heavy penalties for missing payments. As the movie tells it, Kiritsis had set up a meeting with the company’s head, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino; cue the Dog Day Afternoon references), but the elder Hall ditched him and went on vacation instead, leaving his son Richard to deal with him. Kiritsis rolls with the change of plans, dragging Richard out of the building and down the street, a massive police protest precipitating all around him. Among the responding officers: Michael Grable (Cary Elwes), who happens to know Kiritsis from the cop bar where Kiritsis likes to hang out. Grable becomes a central player in the drama, as does a D.J. named Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), who interviews Kiritsis and plays the tape on air.

(Colman Domingo in Dead Man’s Wire. Row K)

For close to three days, the city of Indianapolis — and then the world — watches as the situation drags on. The movie pulls us into Kiritsis’ apartment, where he has Richard tied to a chair, the shotgun still wired to his head. The men talk, sweat, share pastries and Kiritsis’ cooking, and even, for a moment here and there, seem to bond. A strange dance ensues of power, terror, and caretaking that sometimes verges on a gruff sort of tenderness. There are times when Kiritsis has carelessly left a gun in Richard’s reach, yet Richard doesn’t use it; there’s the inevitability of nature’s call, which reduces Richard to pleading for use of the restroom — a necessity that doesn’t dampen Kiritsis’ need for control. “Number one or number two?” he asks, adding, when Richard doesn’t want to specify, “I’m gonna find out anyway.” A more intimate, if almost as cursory, conversation follows after M.L. Hall refuses to pay the money Kiritsis demands as reparation, essentially declaring his preference for a dead son to surrendered cash.

(Myha’la in Dead Man’s Wire. Row K)

To the outside world, the situation is more simplistic, if polarizing: Some hail Kiritsis as a hero, while others condemn him. Meantime, in the some of film’s most pointed satirical jabs, a female reporter (Myha’la) sees the story as a potential big career break while back at the TV station her skeevy boss grins over the promise of a ratings bonanza. If this weren’t based on true events (Colman’s fictional character aside), it could be a story set in the here and now: Denunciations of “terrorism” and “socialism,” words misused to the point of gibberish, would vie as clickbait with the sort of social media glorification that we’ve seen celebrate Luigi Mangione. Perhaps that is the point; Van Sant, after all, likes his movies to be socially relevant, if not always quite this quirky and ironic. But Van Sant also makes this a suspense movie, with Montgomery channeling moment-by-moment existential terror and Skarsgård turning in an award-worthy performance as a man driven to extremes.

“Dead Man’s Wire” premieres in theaters Jan. 9.