Portland Mercury•about 6 hours ago

Gus Van Sant's New Film Returns to His True Crime Roots

Al Pacino does not appear to ever stand up in this film. by Dom Sinacola Al Pacino does not stand up at any point in Dead Man’s Wire. He's in three scenes, sitting in all of them—supine, in fact. We could call the performance somnambulant were he to ever actually get up and walk.  However, no one expects Pacino to put his whole mid-octagenarian, egregiously feather-haired self into what amounts to a glorified cameo. What everyone should expect, though, is that he’ll roll that old-ass tongue around an accent that must be from the Kentucky side of Indiana—where Gus Van Sant, Dead Man’s Wire director, grew up—because why else would he sound like an ambien’d-up Foghorn Leghorn? Pacino plays mortgage broker M.L. Hall as a pretty straightforward, low-effort Bad Dad, the kind of hyperquiet rich monster who’d rather whisper goodbye to his own son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) than admit to any wrongdoing or compromise with Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a desperate behind-on-his-mortgage-payments everyschlub who has taken his son hostage. Dead Man’s Wire is based on a real 1977 Indianapolis hostage situation, where the real Tony Kiritsis kidnapped the son of his mortgage broker at the end of a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. In Van Sant's film we see Kiritsis rig the shotgun with the titular wire, setting it up to blow Dick’s head to smithereens if he tries to escape. At first glance, Dead Man’s Wire looks like a return to the media-obsessed true crime Candyland of Van Sant’s early breakthrough To Die For (1995), which was a breakthrough amongst breakthroughs Van Sant enjoyed throughout the late ‘80s and 90s, squeezed between Good Will Hunting (1997) and the twin triumphs of Portland outsider tales, Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). But the most surprising thing about Gus Van Sant’s first feature in seven years might be that it's a mostly uncomplicated potboiler. Unlike Pacino, Skarsgård attacks Kiritsis’ whole deal with barely sublimated intensity, constantly smoothing out his thin mustache to tamp down anger and a sense of personal justice bubbling beneath the surface of his eternally moist dermis. It’s an undeniably charming performance from a preternaturally handsome Skarsgård, but his Kiritsis is a whole different physical specimen from the actual Kiritsis.  We know this because Van Sant fills his film with actual news footage from the 62-hour standoff, constantly smearing his fictionalized Indianapolis with the well-documented, if sensationalized, events. Cinematographer Arnaud Potier—most recently employed by Harmony Korine for 2023’s Aggro Dr1ft—helped Van Sant maintain some notion of vérité throughout the film. Potier's late-’70s Indiana (filmed in Louisville) is an ochre-and-gray winter urban nowhere that stitches up seamlessly with the well-aged broadcasts from the time. As a result, watching the film feels like being a bystander both at home and on the scene, wondering what all the fuss is about. If you know this story, you know how the movie ends: Kiritsis’ plan to hold the young Hall until he gets the money he feels he’s owed, an apology, and a pardon doesn’t quite go his way. But even if you don’t know this story, it’s difficult to imagine that you wouldn’t have heard about it, had it really broke bad. Deluged by reality, Dead Man’s Wire begins to leak tension, and even the manufactured parts of the narrative don't reveal much we couldn’t gather from a well-written article about what happened. The film never quite exits that liminal space between adapted and contrived. In that sense, Dead Man’s Wire resembles last year’s The Smashing Machine, directed by Benny Safdie and based with meticulous verisimilitude on the 2002 John Hyams documentary of the same name. Led by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's performance as iconic mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, the film goes to great lengths to essentially reenact the documentary, in many cases shot-for-shot, to the extent that Safdie’s attention to detail begins to function as an exercise instead of any sort of unique perspective. During the softer moments of Dead Man’s Wire, questions may drift to the back of your mind, like: With all this material, why not just make a documentary? Even Van Sant’s admitted that this was a for-hire directing gig. As geeked as he seems to be able to make a movie quickly in his hometown, he doesn’t exactly evince any real emotional connection to the script, nodding along with the vague thematic ties to his own work. Still, it warms the heart to see Van Sant somewhat back in his thriller element after the sparsely pleasant Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018), which was preceded by my nomination for Van Sant’s worst film, treacly suckfest The Sea of Trees (2015). That an old hand like Cary Elwes—in a very un-Cary-Elwes-like role as scummy cop Mike Grable—and a new working titan like Colman Domingo (as effortlessly cool DJ Fred Temple), are game to join Van Sant’s cast for glossless character work helps liven up the otherwise A-to-B proceedings. It's interesting to have Domingo’s presence, as it reminds us of the last film in which he was the source of light for a dreary ensemble, the spineless Running Man remake starring Glen Powell. And like Powell, Skarsgård’s overt handsomeness and effusive likability belies the real anger and naïve sense of injustice at the heart of Kiritsis’s story.  Far from a heady dissection of the media mechanisms that convinced Kiritsis that he could get away with such a plan—that were so prevalent even in the ’70s that he believed popular consensus would prove him to be the hero—Dead Man’s Wire is about as compelling as Pacino’s performance. Regardless, the film should give us hope for a new prolific era in the 73-year-old director’s long career. At least he’s doing something. Dead Man’s Wire opens in wide release on Fri Jan 16, 105 minutes, rated R.