The 1970s have, for quite awhile now, become a common time frame for American period films. That decade saw the youth counterculture emerge into the mainstream in clothing, lingo, long hair, and a tendency towards the weird and marginal, with multiple challenges to the status quo. It’s a fertile setting for satiric commentary on America. Moreover, the ‘70s were a period when filmmaking broke through the old studio taboos, resulting in an amazing assortment of movies that have acted as an influence on our cinema ever since.
To this genre we can add Gus Van Sant’s new film Dead Man’s Wire. It’s based on actual events in Indianapolis in 1977. Bill Skarsgård plays Tony Kiritsis, a loner frustrated in his attempts to turn a piece of property he bought into a shopping center. One morning he walks into the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company carrying a long package and claiming that he has an appointment with the owner, M.L. Hall. Unfortunately, the receptionist tells him, Mr. Hall has suddenly gone on vacation to Florida. Cut to Hall, an arrogant, ugly and dismissive old man played by Al Pacino, behaving abusively because his meal at a Florida hotel has not been prepared to his liking.
Back to Kiritsis, who is furious at being stood up, until Hall’s son Dick, the company president played by Dacre Montgomery, comes forward to try to help him, inviting him up to his executive office. Once there, Kiritsis pulls a gun on Hall, makes him sit in a chair, and takes a shotgun out of the box, which has a wire that he wraps around Hall’s neck in such a way that any extreme movement will cause the trigger to be pulled and shoot the man in the head.
Kiritsis proceeds to call the police and spills out his grievances about the ways he claims the mortgage company has cheated him, some of which at least sound legitimate. Then he leads his hostage out of the building, with the cops trying to talk sense into him, demands they give him a police car, which he gets into and has his hostage drive him to his apartment, that he tells the police is wired to explode if anyone interferes. His demands are immunity, release from debt, five million dollars in restitution, and an apology from M.L. Hall.
Bill Skarsgård, another talented member of the Skarsgård acting family, is particularly good at portraying crazy evil people, famously as Pennywise the Clown in the recent versions of Stephen King’s It, and Count Orlok in Nosferatu last year. Here he’s brilliant as the rageful, erratic, and hopelessly naïve Tony Kiritsis. This film, with its serious true-to-life premise, manages to also be funny. Screenwriter Austin Kolodney has written and directed TV comedies for a number of years. Here the laughs come from the absurd contrast between Kiritsis’s insane demands and his desire to be a friendly guy and a hero. The gaping astonishment of the city officials, cops, and reporters becomes funnier as Kiritsis’s talk becomes more unhinged. He happens to have a favorite local radio station, and ends up demanding to deal only with its popular DJ Fred Temple, a black gentleman played by Coleman Domingo, who talks with a rich soulful voice while spinning the best current funk records. Domingo’s expressions while trying to deal with this guy are priceless.
This is the first film from Gus Van Sant in seven years, and it looks like it was a lot of fun to make. In this film noir-titled Dead Man’s Wire, he revels in the ridiculous aspects of our so-called American dream.
