Walking a fine line

Loosely based on a real-life hostage taking in Indianapolis in 1977, this period crime drama from veteran director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) and screenwriter Austin Kolodney (making his feature-film debut) is packed with scruffy retro style and some cool callbacks.

The 1970s were a decade of paranoia, cynicism and division. (Maybe that’s why they’re resonating in pop culture right now.) Dead Man’s Wire channels some of the antihero energy of Dog Day Afternoon. It riffs on the mad-as-hell rants of Network. It gives us a turtlenecked, leather-jacketed cop like Serpico.

The hair is long, the cars are the size of barges and the colour palette suggests old Polaroid photos.

There’s dark humour and some sly, intriguing performances, but there’s also something missing. Dead Man’s Wire throws out heady ideas — looking at the era’s deepening distrust of institutions, the rise of vulture capitalism and the shifting role of media — but never really follows them up.

Bill Skarsgård (It) plays Tony Kiritsis, and when we first see him, he’s a man with a grievance and a suspiciously long cardboard box. Tony has an appointment at the Meridian mortgage company, run by father-and-son team M.L. Hall (Al Pacino, who starred in Dog Day Afternoon way back when) and Dick Hall (Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery).

Tony has taken out a loan to develop a plot of land into a shopping centre, and he believes the Halls have deliberately discouraged potential tenants in the hopes Tony will default on the loan, allowing them to swoop in and develop the property themselves.

The mysterious cardboard box turns out to contain a sawed-off shotgun, and it’s soon connected to Tony and to Dick’s neck via that titular “dead man’s wire.” Tony wants legal immunity, financial restitution and, more than anything else, an apology.

Any sudden moves and Dick will be dead.

Van Sant proceeds to track the 63-hour hostage ordeal, as the pair retreats to Tony’s apartment, followed closely by cops (including The Princess Bride’s Cary Elwes, hidden under a lot of hair) and a swarm of TV news trucks.

The bond that develops between Tony and Dick can be fascinating, but it’s also curiously tension-free.

Skarsgård plays Tony as an abrupt, awkward, off-putting guy who can be poignant at times, scary at others. He alternates between threatening to blow Dick’s head off and apologizing for being a bad host. (Did he remember to fill the ice cube trays, Tony wonders at one point.) Dick, handcuffed and facing a 12-gauge shotgun, is getting through on stoicism and sheer endurance.

We soon see that while Tony and Dick are two very different men, they have both suffered under the monstrous, malignant narcissism of Dick’s father, which is on display with some fabulous Pacino flair. (We’re first introduced to M.L. poolside in Florida, as he sends back a burrito because it’s been cut into halves rather than thirds. He just gets worse and worse.)

There are other characters circling around Tony and Dick. There’s cub reporter Linda Page (Industry’s Myha’la), who’s desperate to get closer to the scene, and smooth, suave radio DJ Fred Temple (Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo), considered “the voice of Indianapolis,” who is pulled into the situation against his will.

Van Sant sometimes freezes a scene into a black-and-white press photo or transforms it into grainy TV news footage, just to remind us how this event is being filtered through the media. And the Kiritsis story is still used at journalism schools as a case study in what happens when the media becomes part of the story they’re covering.

What are the ethical issues involved in platforming hostage-takers and their demands? And what about reporting in real time on law enforcement tactics, since hostage takers can watch TV, too? Kolodney raises these important questions but then kind of trails off. (You can see these ideas explored with much more depth in the 2024 film September 5 about the hostage situation at the 1972 Munich Olympics.)

Dead Man’s Wire is complicated with its sympathies, in a way that is both intriguing and frustrating. Is Tony a hard-done-by everyman with a righteous cause? “I’m a goddamn national hero,” he declares at one point. Or is he an aggrieved, angry, semi-delusional loner?

Maybe he’s a bit of both, but the film doesn’t give us enough hard information to fully understand the man or his motivations. This is the kind of “based on a true story” movie that will have viewers googling things in the lobby afterwards. They might sense that this version — for all its throwback style and interesting vibes — leaves some crucial stuff out.

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