With terrific chatter, a darkly comic flair, and a cool, ruthless non-intellectualism, screenwriter Austin Kolodny and director Gus Van Sant have crafted a true-crime short-lived thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and the network. On top of everything else, it’s a reminder that in this post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, there were plenty of illegal and febrile things going on that would now be considered phenomena that could only be attributed to social media.
In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall and tied Hall’s neck with “dead man’s wire” to his biceps, which would therefore go away if police shooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even showed his victim like this on television while he read out his demands – a grotesque display in which the national TV networks were avidly complicit. Van Sant’s recreation of this extraordinary moment calls to mind the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in front of the police and press.
Kiritsis had mortgaged himself to buy land that he thought could be developed as a shopping mall, but fell behind on his loan repayments and became convinced—perhaps not without reason—that Hall and his fellow mortgage broker father were manipulating and exploiting the situation with ulterior motives on his land. Bill Skarsgård plays the paranoia- and rage-filled Kiritsis as tense and pop-eyed as the character on The Simpsons; Dacre Montgomery is the hapless Hall, trapped in Kiritsis’ apartment with a wire rattle around his throat and the barrel of a gun stuck in his neck for 72 hours straight. Al Pacino has a disturbing cameo in the “southern gentleman” voice he’s adopted these days, as Hall’s high-handed father, who refuses to give Kiritsis the apology he wants over the phone and even jeers at his son for having “Stockholm Syndrome.” Myha’la (from the TV industry) plays fictional TV reporter Linda Page, who is not determined to cheat for her scoop, and Colman Domingo has a richly enjoyable role as the unabashedly laid-back radio DJ and phone-in host Fred Temple, based on the real-life Indianapolis radio star Fred Heckman, whom the kiritsis actually called to broadcast his rants, which was Fred Heckman.
What is extraordinary about this drama is that, played out differently, Hall’s unspeakable ordeal—because that is, of course, what it was—would be the material for something deeply and almost unimaginably shocking. But Hall’s mental health and what is thought to be lifelong PTSD are given little attention here, mimicking the media and courts of the time, which were instead preoccupied with the question of whether Kiritsis was insane and whether he was entitled to a plea of insanity. (By contrast, the other great kidnapping case of the US era, the 1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich, was the subject of Taffy Broaddes-Akner’s novel The Long Island Compromise, which explored the idea of generational PTSD passed on to the victim’s children.)
The personas and performances of Pacino, Domingo, and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic absurdity of the affair and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a heartless but lively professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper. It’s a gripping picture with excellent performances.
