Gus Van Sant’s account of the 1977 Kiritsis siege is a tight, sweaty, funny two-hander, and Bill Skarsgård is the reason to see it. What it thinks about the man and the country that made him, it mostly leaves to us.
Gus Van Sant has gone back to 1977 and to Tony Kiritsis, who walked into his mortgage broker’s office, put a shotgun to the back of Richard Hall’s head and wired the trigger to his own neck. If the police shoot Kiritsis, the gun goes off. That arrangement is called a dead man’s wire, and the film is built the same way: two men joined at the neck, neither able to let go. It is tight, funny and unpleasant in the right ways, and it is worth your evening. It is also thinner than it thinks.
Bill Skarsgård plays Kiritsis as a talker. He talks to Hall, to the police, to a radio station, to anyone who picks up, and the burden of all of it is that he is the injured party and the world owes him a hearing. Skarsgård gives him a boyish grin that arrives half a second before the threat and a habit of turning too fast, and every time he turned we flinched, because the gun turned with him. We laughed a good deal, mostly at his wounded logic, and somewhere in the second half we noticed how far we had gone along with him and did not like it. That unease is the best thing in the film, and it is nearly all his.
Dacre Montgomery has the less grateful part. Hall is a decent, frightened man with nothing much to say for himself, and Montgomery plays him that way rather than inventing a spine the man may not have had. He listens, he agrees, he waits. The blandness is on purpose, and it is what keeps Kiritsis talking, so it is doing more work than it looks.
Austin Kolodney’s script keeps it indoors, and Stefan Dechant makes each place count: a broker’s office of veneer and brown carpet, then a flat where the curtains stay drawn and the ashtrays fill. Arnaud Potier shoots close and grainy, mostly at the height of a seated man, so that Hall’s face and the barrel share the frame more often than not. Peggy Schnitzer dresses Kiritsis like a man who bought his wardrobe once, some years earlier, and stopped. Saar Klein drops in freeze-frames and snatches of radio that halt the standoff for a few seconds at a time, which could have been cute and instead makes the waiting longer. Danny Elfman writes sparingly and lets the period songs carry the mood.
The trouble is everyone else. Cary Elwes as Michael Grable, Myha’la as Linda Page and Kelly Lynch as Mabel Hall are all good in the scenes they get, and they get about a scene and a half each. Vinh Nguyen’s young radio producer, with a hostage-taker on the line and no training for it, is the liveliest thread outside the flat, and the film keeps leaving it to go back inside. We understand why; the flat is where the tension lives. But a siege is also a city holding its breath, and this one rarely gets past the police tape.
Van Sant knows what the story is about. A man who believes the money men cheated him, and an institution that would sooner risk a life than say sorry, has not stopped being current, and the film trusts us to notice without being told. That is a fair choice. We also wanted it, just once, to decide whether Kiritsis is a folk hero or a dangerous fool, or to show us why that is the wrong question. It declines, and the last half hour is slighter for it.
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) hangs over this, and Van Sant does not pretend otherwise. What he does not borrow is Lumet’s crowd; the street outside the bank was half of what that film had to say. Against his own record this is smaller than Milk (2008) and neater than Elephant (2003), and it is his most straightforwardly enjoyable film in a long while.
See it with someone, because you will want to argue afterwards about how much sympathy he earned, and the film will not settle it for you. At home the flat gets smaller and the wire, if anything, tighter. It runs 106 minutes and carries a 15. How it ended is a matter of record, and we are not going to repeat it.
