Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a> as a feral geek in a lime-green polyester shirt and an ugly mustache, has taken Richard Hall hostage\u00a0because Hall and his father, who owns the company (he\u2019s played, in a sly wink of a cameo, by Al Pacino, sealing the \u201cDog Day\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\tThe 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\u2019s been backed into a corner and is acting out of a fury that has justifiably boiled over. \u201cDead Man\u2019s Curve\u201d 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, \u201cBugonia,\u201d with Luigi Mangione\u2019s murder of the CEO of United Health Care \u2014 and that killing bears even more relevance here. The whole real-time, hand-held aesthetic of \u201cDead Man\u2019s Wire,\u201d which Van Sant brings off with astonishing flair, looks at Tony Kiritsis\u2019s actions \u201cobjectively.\u201d But beneath that it\u2019s actually a moralistic movie that says, of the mortgage company, \u201cThey deserved what they got.\u201d In the film\u2019s view, they\u2019re the real criminals.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut I\u2019d be a lot more comfortable with that view if Van Sant, working from a script by Austin Kolodney, hadn\u2019t tweaked the facts of the case to conform to his vision. In truth, there\u2019s no evidence that Meridian Mortgage did anything to stop Tony Kiritsis\u2019s grand plan from taking shape. And that\u2019s a serious issue, because the notion that they screwed him over is presented as the film\u2019s key analogue of what\u2019s happening today: banks and mortgage companies stacking the deck. If it didn\u2019t actually happen that way in this particular case, then the meaning of what we\u2019re watching changes.<\/p>\n
\n\tVan Sant would say that he\u2019s not making a documentary. And Kiritsis, as Skarsg\u00e5rd plays him (with a jittery but logical fast-talk fervor that makes this one of the actor\u2019s 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 \u2014 it\u2019s the Pacino character who\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere\u2019s no doubt that \u201cDead Man\u2019s Wire\u201d holds you. It\u2019s Van Sant\u2019s 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\u2019s a bit like someone making a drama about the Patty Hearst kidnapping and presenting the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army as heroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d in miniature, though with more loony-tunes firepower. On Feb. 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[30270,30271,18,117,30272,19,17,327,11492],"class_list":{"0":"post-39520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bill-skarsgu00e5rd","9":"tag-dead-mans-wire","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-gus-van-sant","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-venice-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}