Dead Man’s Wire Review
1977, Indianapolis. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) walks into a mortgage company with a loaded gun, intending to take the boss (Al Pacino) hostage, after he screwed him over in a business deal. He isn’t there, so he makes do with his son, Dick (Dacre Montgomery). Tony attaches the gun around Dick’s neck and to himself, forming a ‘dead man’s wire’; meaning if the police shoot Tony, then Dick will die too. A media furore builds, as the cops, and the radio DJ (Colman Domingo) who proves the only voice that Tony is willing to listen to, try to figure out how to save Dick’s life.
The shocking central events of Dead Man’s Wire, the first narrative film from director Gus Van Sant in seven years, are true – a picture of Tony and Dick won the Pulitzer Prize that year. That it was captured by so many cameras allowed Van Sant to endow the movie with period authenticity, melding archival footage with re-enactments to conjure the strange, fevered atmosphere of those few days in Indianapolis.
More impressive than that, however, is the way that Van Sant and writer Austin Kolodney find their specific tone. Dead Man’s Wire is a story about one man driven to despair to the extent he’s willing to kidnap, and perhaps kill, another… but the absurdity of the resultant circus is often very funny. The humour and the horror sit together with surprising ease, neither taking anything from the other, and the combination making the whole bizarre situation feel all the more messily real.
That control of tone extends into the performances as well, especially Bill Skarsgård’s as our antihero. It would have been very easy to make this bumbling goofball a purely comic creation, but Skarsgård keeps him grounded in a painful, if awkward, humanity; even when he spirals off into bizarre tangents, or becomes so besotted by the presence of his favourite DJ that he forgets what he’s meant to be doing (that DJ is played by the mellifluous Colman Domingo, so who could blame him!?), there’s not a moment where he isn’t believable.
His performance is given even more dimension in the way it contrasts with Dacre Montgomery’s, as his hostage, Dick. Both men should hate each other, and often very much seem to, but they also share a mutual sympathy that gives the movie much of its pathos. Dick isn’t really the villain Tony was after, after all; that was Dick’s father M.L (a gloriously OTT Al Pacino), who manages to skirt the whole affair while on holiday to the other side of the country. Given the opportunity to help his son in the simplest, most untaxing of ways, M.L demurs.
Even if Dead Man’s Wire doesn’t exactly endorse Tony’s view of himself as a heroic vigilante, this millionaire who’s able to cause so much pain, and then use his ill-gotten gains to avoid paying any kind of price for it, is inarguably the bad guy. Though the events the movie’s based on took place half a century ago, that makes it feel pretty damn timely.
★★★★
