Review: 'Dead Man's Wire' faithfully recreates a TV hostage standoff but avoids the messy why
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In between such pistol-packing antiheroes as Bonnie Parker and Luigi Mangione, financially-squeezed Americans rooted for Tony Kiritsis, a working stiff who took his mortgage lender hostage in 1977 Indianapolis, claiming that the loan company cheated him out of his land.“Dead Man’s Wire,” the title of Gus Van Sant’s wonky true crime caper, comes from Kiritsis’ weapon: a shotgun tied to a noose looped around the neck of his prisoner, Richard Hall.
His hair-trigger homemade contraption pressured all three major networks into giving Kiritsis airtime to explain his grievances to the public.Pressing a sawed-off barrel to Hall’s head, the hot-tempered chatterbox told the cameras, “I am sorry I humiliated this man this way, even though he must’ve surely had it coming.”To the establishment’s horror, many viewers sided with Kiritsis.
“How about some Tony Kiritsis t-shirts, some Tony Kiritsis badges, a Tony Kiritsis fan club?” one supporter wrote to the local paper, the Indianapolis News.Or how about a biopic that fires blanks?Van Sant has long taken aim at the intersection of violence and mass media culture.Over his career, he’s attacked it from several angles, including the fame-seeking satire of “To Die For,” his elegy for the publicly out politician of “Milk” and the clinical ennui of “Elephant,” his take on the Columbine massacre, in which his pair of teen killers numb themselves with grisly entertainment.
Kiritsis’ story is an irresistible target: an ignored man thrilled to have the attention of the spanking new Action News squads who barge onto the scene unprepared for the risk they might broadcast an on-air murder.But this time, Van Sant seems more interested in the period-piece décor and the aesthetics of early video footage (the cinematography is by Arnaud Potier) than he is in the bleak humor of Kiritsis’ televised tirade cutting t...