The recent trend of movies set in the past but still within living memory is a natural effort to find out how the hell we got here, but I discern another underlying motive: to show life before social media and the primacy of cellphones in daily life. Directors are still struggling with the task of filming the digital world, whereas analog media, which depend on face-to-face action and interpersonal decision-making, are ready-made for movies. Gus Van Sant’s new crime drama, “Dead Man’s Wire,” is based on an incident from 1977, in which an Indianapolis man took hostage an executive at a mortgage company to which he owed money. Because part of this saga unfolded in front of TV cameras, Van Sant’s film is also a story of media — its role in delivering news, in deciding what constitutes news in the first place, and in serving as an echo chamber for attention-seekers who are precisely trying to make news.
The movie opens one Tuesday morning in February, with a suave-voiced, lyrically aphoristic d.j., Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), waxing cool on the airwaves — even as his casual riff, “Joker, joker, joker,” hints at a crisis that’s brewing in the mind of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), a fan of the show, who has tuned in while driving. A socially awkward man in early middle age, he’s on his way to the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company. But something seems off. Tony is flustered to learn that he’ll be meeting not with the firm’s boss but with the boss’s son, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), who is also a Meridian executive. Tony looks a little strange, too — one arm is in a sling and in his other he carries a long, thin, and battered box. Someone should have peeked in, because when Richard ushers Tony into an office upstairs, Tony draws a pistol from the sling, handcuffs Richard, and takes a sawed-off shotgun from the box. He wires the shotgun to the back of Richard’s neck and to his own body. This is the “dead man’s wire” of the title, and it insures that if Richard tries to flee or Tony is caught or killed, Richard will be shot in the head.
Tony is a man of grievance. His story is a bit tangled, but what emerges is that Meridian holds the mortgage on some property that he bought in the hope of leasing it to a shopping-mall developer. He believes that Meridian knowingly coaxed the developer to build elsewhere, on a tract of land that the company itself had an interest in — thus sticking Tony with a mortgage while depriving him of the income to pay it. The person Tony blames isn’t Richard but Richard’s father, M. L. Hall (Al Pacino) who’s seen sitting at poolside, in Florida, at arrogant leisure, humiliating a waiter who brings his breakfast. But, with M. L. unavailable, Tony takes Richard hostage instead and demands an apology from M. L. and a payment of five million dollars.
Tony’s plans are meticulous, but he proves to be, so to speak, a gifted improviser, and he essentially summons his collaborators: he makes Richard call 911 and tell the authorities what’s happening, and then gets on the phone himself to explain how the dead man’s wire works. When the police quickly show up, as Tony clearly expected, he parades Richard through the lobby, out of the building, and into the street. The police follow closely but do nothing, even when Tony “borrows” a police car to drive off to the apartment complex where he lives and hole up there with his hostage. Everywhere he goes, he’s followed not only by police but also by a gaggle of reporters, something that Van Sant emphasizes with inserts of black-and-white newspaper photographs of the events and clips of the TV news coverage.
