With terrific chutzpah, black-comic flair and cool, cruel unsentimentality, screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant have made a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Apart from anything else, it is a reminder that in that post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, plenty of lawless and febrile things happened that would now be considered phenomena purely attributable to social media.
In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall, and tied Hall’s neck with a “dead man’s wire” to his shotgun, which would therefore go off if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even paraded his victim like this on TV while he read out his demands, a grotesque display in which national TV networks were blandly complicit. Van Sant’s recreation of this extraordinary moment calls to mind the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in front of police and press.
Kiritsis had mortgaged himself to buy land he thought could be developed as a shopping mall, but fell behind with the loan repayments and became convinced – perhaps not without reason – that Hall and his fellow mortgage broker father were manipulating and exploiting the situation with secret designs on his land. Bill Skarsgård, as tense and pop-eyed as a character in The Simpsons, plays the paranoid and rage-filled Kiritsis; Dacre Montgomery is the unhappy Hall imprisoned in Kiritsis’s apartment with the wire-noose around his throat and the shotgun barrel jammed to his neck for 72 hours straight. Al Pacino has an uproarious cameo in the “southern gentleman” voice that he has adopted these days, as Hall’s high-handed father who refuses to give Kiritsis the apology he wants over the phone and even jeers at his son for having “Stockholm syndrome”. Myha’la (from TV’s Industry) plays fictionalised TV reporter Linda Page determined not to be cheated of her scoop, and Colman Domingo has a richly enjoyable role as imperturbably laid-back radio DJ and phone-in host Fred Temple, based on the real life Indianapolis radio star Fred Heckman, whom Kiritsis actually did call up to broadcast his grievances on the air.
What is extraordinary about this drama is that, played another way, Hall’s unspeakable ordeal – for that is surely what it was – would be material for something deeply and almost unthinkably shocking. But Hall’s mental health and what would presumably be lifelong PTSD is given scant attention here, mimicking the media and the courts at the time who were instead infatuated by the issue of whether Kiritsis was insane and if he was therefore entitled to an insanity plea. (By contrast,the US’s other great kidnapping case of the time, the 1974 abduction of Jack Teich, was the subject of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Long Island Compromise, which explored the idea of generational PTSD that went down to the victim’s children.)
The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper. It’s a gripping picture with excellent performances.
Dead Man’s Wire screened at the Venice film festival.
