It was “Dog Day Afternoon” in miniature, though with more loony-tunes firepower. On Feb. 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis, a disgruntled resident of Indianapolis, walked into the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. He wired the sawed-off muzzle of a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun to the back of Hall’s head. One end of the wire was connected to the trigger; the other end was wrapped around Hall’s neck. This meant that if a police officer tried to shoot Kiritsis, or if Hall tried to escape, the gun would go off and kill him.
With that gun poised, at any moment, to blow Hall to smithereens, Kiritsis then walked him out of the building and into a car (trailed by random onlookers and a news camera), and they drove to Kiritsis’s home in the Crestwood Apartments complex, where they holed up for 63 hours. At that point, Kiritsis gave a news conference — it was broadcast live on national TV, interrupting an awards speech by John Wayne — in which he ramblingly explained his actions and made his demands. It was, of course, all about the money.
Over time, awareness of this very 1970s incident fell by the wayside, but in 2022 Jon Hamm starred in an eight-episode podcast dramatization of it. And it’s not hard to see why Gus Van Sant, the director of “Dead Man’s Wire,” wanted to make a film of it. It’s got that freak existential hair-trigger suspense — in this case, literally.
But in “Dog Day Afternoon,” gripping and memorable as it was (no one disputes that it’s one of the great films of the ’70s), part of the emotional thrust was that Al Pacino’s Sonny was a figure of supremely haunted fascination, a man you were desperate to understand and even felt for at times, but the movie never pretended that he was doing the right thing. Even as it was revealed that the motivation for his attempted bank robbery was to get the money to pay for his lover, Leon (an indelible Chris Sarandon), to have what was then called a sex change, the movie glimpsed Sonny’s pain but still had the rigor to recognize that his plan was nuts.
“Dead Man’s Wire” isn’t like that. The reason Van Sant made a movie about this incident is so that he could showcase the entire screw-loose kidnap drama as an allegory of today: our current economic breakdown, with the little guy getting crushed by Big Money.
In the movie, Tony, played by Bill Skarsgård as a feral geek in a lime-green polyester shirt and an ugly mustache, has taken Richard Hall hostage because Hall and his father, who owns the company (he’s played, in a sly wink of a cameo, by Al Pacino, sealing the “Dog Day” connection), have screwed him over financially. Kiritsis bought a plot of land on the west end of the city on which he was planning to build a shopping center. The mortgage for it ($130,000) has come due; he can’t pay up, so Meridian is seizing the real estate. But Kiritsis claims that the Halls knew how valuable the property was, and that they systematically discouraged all the potential shopping-mall vendors from doing business with him. According to Kiritsis, they illegally put the clampdown on his dream.
The way the movie sees it, this is what mortgage companies do (they screw you over). So Kiritsis, while his plan is undeniably wacked, is still someone who’s been backed into a corner and is acting out of a fury that has justifiably boiled over. “Dead Man’s Curve” is the second film to premiere at Venice this year in which a violent kidnapping expresses the impotent outrage that people feel today. Emma Stone has already compared the situation in her film, “Bugonia,” with Luigi Mangione’s murder of the CEO of United Health Care — and that killing bears even more relevance here. The whole real-time, hand-held aesthetic of “Dead Man’s Wire,” which Van Sant brings off with astonishing flair, looks at Tony Kiritsis’s actions “objectively.” But beneath that it’s actually a moralistic movie that says, of the mortgage company, “They deserved what they got.” In the film’s view, they’re the real criminals.
But I’d be a lot more comfortable with that view if Van Sant, working from a script by Austin Kolodney, hadn’t tweaked the facts of the case to conform to his vision. In truth, there’s no evidence that Meridian Mortgage did anything to stop Tony Kiritsis’s grand plan from taking shape. And that’s a serious issue, because the notion that they screwed him over is presented as the film’s key analogue of what’s happening today: banks and mortgage companies stacking the deck. If it didn’t actually happen that way in this particular case, then the meaning of what we’re watching changes.
Van Sant would say that he’s not making a documentary. And Kiritsis, as Skarsgård plays him (with a jittery but logical fast-talk fervor that makes this one of the actor’s two or three most potent performances), is a very different figure than the real Tony Kiritisis, who was older and more visibly deranged. Dacre Montgomery plays Dick Hall as a softball of privilege (and a perfectly likable one — it’s the Pacino character who’s the scoundrel), and Colman Domingo seizes the role of Fred Temple, the smooth Afrocentric Indianapolis DJ who Tony reveres, to the point that Temple becomes a live-on-the-air kidnap therapist and hostage negotiator, stringing Tony along as he tries to cool the situation.
There’s no doubt that “Dead Man’s Wire” holds you. It’s Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time. The movie plays, and part of it is that it triggers our anti-institutional anger. In truth, though, it’s a bit like someone making a drama about the Patty Hearst kidnapping and presenting the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army as heroes.
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