Tony Kiritsis (the excellent Bill Skarsgård; Nosferatu) is a nervy, paranoid oddball. Well, he would be. He has an appointment with a mortgage broker and in the long cardboard box that he’s carrying is a sawn-off shotgun.
Gus Van Sant’s first feature film since Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) is itself something of an oddball project. Fraught and compelling, with Al Pacino as a very nasty businessman, it's based on the true story of a hostage crisis in Indianapolis in 1977 and is a tense, claustrophobic depiction of the little guy pitted against a corrupt banking system. Though this little guy is verging on crazy, which does muddy the waters.
The stand-off captured the American public imagination at the time – was Tony going to shoot Dick on live radio or even TV? – and has already been the subject of a documentary, Dead Man’s Line, in 2018, as well as a podcast starring Jon Hamm, American Hostage, in 2022. So it's Van Sant's new take on well worn territory.
As soon as Tony and Dick Hall (a well cast Dacre Montgomery, pictured left; Elvis; Stranger Things; Went up the Hill) are ensconced in Dick’s corner office at Meridien Mortgage, he rigs it to both their necks and to the trigger in a contraption – the dead man’s wire in question – that will blow Dick’s head off he makes any sudden moves. And if the police shoot Tony, Dick will go down too.
It feels wonderfully authentic – those low-ceilinged offices, the drab 70s colours, the polyester shirts – and the way Tony manages to take the hunched-over Dick hostage and get him back to his dingy apartment, in spite of a large police presence (some of the cops are his drinking buddies) is grippingly weird, though there’s something a bit thin about the subsequent narrative arc.
Tony’s relationship with his idol, the radio DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo; pictured below), provides a welcome change of scene during the three days that Tony and Dick, played by Montgomery with great intensity, are closeted together, with Dick mainly tied to a chair or occasionally allowed to sleep in the bath.
Tony wants Fred Temple to get his story out and calls him multiple times: these live interviews, with sympathisers calling in about the betrayal of their American dreams, catapult him into temporary fame. And in a separate plot line, Linda, a TV reporter (Myha’la; Industry; pictured below) is desperate to get the scoop, jockeying for position on her channel.
The ins and outs of Tony’s beef with Meridien seem less important than his volatility, and it’s hard to grasp exactly, or indeed to care about, what sent him so ballistic. But it’s clear, more or less, that Tony took out a mortgage, bought land and wanted to build a shopping mall on it. Meridien, he believes, cheated him by showing the land to a better prospect, but strung him along and charged him interest. Tony fell behind with making payments. Anyway, one gets the picture: he was shafted.
“These people have ruined my life,” he says. “They fucked me around for four years. I’ve always been a patsy.” What Tony wants in recompense is $5 million, no prosecution and a formal apology from Dick’s father, ML Hall, played by Al Pacino with a southern drawl. Tony’s sights were set on taking ML hostage, but he’s on vacation in Florida, where we see him bullying a waiter about his burrito having chicken in it on his no-meat Tuesday. So Tony has to make do with Dick.
The relationship between the two changes subtly, perhaps too subtly, as the days go on. Dick’s privileged childhood, happy marriage and kids make Tony resentful – of course you have a golden retriever, he scoffs – but a kind of closeness develops. MH is prepared to sacrifice his son rather than apologise to Tony, and we see Dick’s face fall as he realises this. “Being raised by my dad wasn’t a walk in the park,” Dick confides. Will Tony get his $5 million dollars? Will he walk free? Of course, we already know the answer. The system is rigged.
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