Directed by Gus Van Sant | Written by Austin Kolodney, based on the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line | ▲▲▲1/2
We’ve got a brand new Gus Van Sant in theatres, which in itself is a reason to celebrate — the filmmaker who gave us Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Last Days works too infrequently for my liking.
His new feature is an unvarnished gem. It’s set in Indianapolis in February 1977, and tells a true story of a man who feels betrayed by a mortgage broker around a business venture that ended his shot at the American dream. He walks into the office of the broker in question — who he finds is on vacation in Florida — and so instead takes as a hostage the man’s son, also working for the company. He wires both their heads to a shotgun, the contraption ensuring that if he gets taken down his captor will die instantly, and marches him out of the building in full view of the local cops and TV media.
Our protagonist’s name is Tony Kiritsis, played by a seriously animated Bill Skarsgaard. His captive is Dick Hall, played by Dacre Montgomery, a Stranger Things veteran, and Dick’s dad, ML Hall, is none other than Al Pacino, who gets a couple of good scenes over the phone from the Sunshine State, with his much younger wife played by Drugstore Cowboy veteran, Kelly Lynch.
The presence of Pacino and early scenes of Kiritsis carrying a shotgun in a long-stem rose box helps connect this film to Dog Day Afternoon, but the movie swiftly veers in a different direction. It’s got more in common with the recent, excellent dissection of media history, September 5, though working as subtext rather than text. This is the story of an accidental folk hero empowered by the attention he receives, and despite all the guns it’s less a suspense thriller than a historical drama. It’s speaking the voice of the disenfranchised working class, the quiet part loud.
The meat of the movie is between Kiritsis and Hall Junior, with the aggrieved businessman ranting and raging, willing to do anything to get the apology he feels he deserves including reaching out to a local popular radio host Fred Temple — Colman Domingo, laying on the dulcet tones like aural butter. Bill Skarsgaard, an actor who has carved out a career playing monsters, does maybe his best work playing a deeply driven and disturbed man who nonetheless secures public sympathy.
A nod as well to the captive: Montgomery provides a dollop of vulnerability and humanism. This isn’t a film that wants to be didactic about its story, nor does it construct a myth — it’s laying out the events and letting us make up our own mind about whether Kiritsis is at all justified in his frustrations, if not his actions.
