Leave it to Gus Van Sant to find the homoeroticism in the Tony Kiritsis story. The man who wanted five million dollars and an apology from the mortgage company who wronged him was already a flash fiction piece just from its logline, but it was the specificity of the title-inspiring hostage situation that really put it over the edge. Kiritsis (played here by Bill Skarsgård) rigged a shotgun with a wire noose so that it would fire directly into the skull of mortgage broker Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) if an escape attempt was made or Kiritsis was killed: cue an entire movie of a man tied up with a load about to fire in his face. After the pair leaves for Tony’s apartment — the film’s best line: “I call shotgun!” — the media circus goes typically gun crazy and begins forming the expected narratives around Kiritsis. Whether they paint him as a folk hero for the common man or a greedy lunatic who wants what he can’t have is practically irrelevant when the man himself is hearing every word, and taking it all to his mercurial heart. Colman Domingo, given the role he was born to play as a velvet-voiced radio DJ straight out of The Warriors, gets to serve as the closest thing to a (decidedly male) superstar for Kiritsis to project himself onto when he unspools his psyche for the mass audience he’s captured alongside Hall. A relatively noble reporter played by the mononymous Myha’la, meanwhile, serves to give us a more on-the-ground perspective from outside the Kiritsis apartment where he’s playing the negotiation game and revealing that the mortgage company really did have something coming to them. (Her chosen voice suffers a bit when compared to Domingo’s — all of ours would, but it’s too high-pitched and soft to truly pass muster as a reporter’s.)
Van Sant was a replacement for the original plan of a Werner Herzog film starring Nicolas Cage (perhaps too perfect a combination), and is operating in the sturdy gun-for-hire mode he’s taken more than a few dips into, but homoeroticism isn’t the only element of Dead Man’s Wire that fits into his typical interests. Violence in America and the accompanying bloodlust of the media have long been critical recurrences in his filmography, and his familiar use of black-and-white stills that seem to sputter into motion make a few appearances here to bridge scenes. He seems to be having fun being back in the chair for the first time in seven years and conjuring up the 1970s, complete with an enjoyably ridiculous Al Pacino performance to heighten the obvious Dog Day Afternoon linkage. Pacino has aged into being the representative of the system rather than the queer-coded rebel, playing Hall’s greedy father who has no interest in giving Kiritsis anything he wants, even with his son’s life potentially on the line. Skarsgård is not a match for Kiritsis on a physical level, and has always been inclined toward the kind of overdone gesturing that was too much and too obvious even for his more famous killer clown and vampire parts, but this winds up basically working for the sheer amount of entitled rage that someone playing Kiritsis needs to conjure up. He’s able to match the distinctively rubber-faced energy Pacino has been bringing to most of his recent roles in their one scene together — Montgomery’s Hall isn’t really meant to register as anything other than a stand-in for the system and the men Kiritsis has unresolved tensions with.
Dead Man’s Wire wraps up quickly. The credits roll around the 95-minute mark, and it’s not a story that ever carried the potential for an excess of nuances and subtleties — the real story ended unhappily for both Kiritsis and the company, which perhaps means Kiritsis won the war after losing the battle. The film as a whole largely seems to exist as a reminder that someone like Luigi Mangione has his own set of predecessors, and that nothing in America’s perpetual class war ever changes so much as it just becomes gaudier and louder. While Dead Man’s Wire is hardly as minimal as Van Sant’s Tarr-influenced Death Trilogy titles from the 2000s, it’s a movie that keeps its scale appropriately mano a mano even with a flood of cameras just outside the door, and has a similar quality of briefly evoking something to think about before the final shots.
DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant; CAST: Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino, Colman Domingo, Dacre Montgomery, Myha’la; DISTRIBUTOR: Row K Entertainment; IN THEATERS: December 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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