Dead Man's Wire

Dead Man’s Wire begins on a cold February morning in the 1970s. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) walks into the offices of Meridian Mortgage regarding his loan that he’s been unable to make payments on, with a mysterious white package under his arm (that’s never good). Immediately, his plan begins to go awry. The receptionist at the front is different; he doesn’t recognize her. He’s thrown off. And the man he has the appointment with, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), is on vacation, so at the last minute, he has to meet with his son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery).

Richard leads Tony into his dad’s office to discuss the details of the loan. Tony reaches into the package and hands him a rolled-up piece of paper. Plans, he says, for the land he purchased through the mortgage loan. When Richard opens the paper and spreads it out on the desk in front of him, it’s the schematics for a shotgun. Sure enough, Tony has him at gunpoint and has him wrap a wire, connected to the shotgun, around his neck. As per the movie’s title, this is called a dead man’s wire. If Richard struggles, or if he tries to escape, the gun goes off, and he dies. If the police shoot Tony, the gun goes off, and Richard dies. Using the device, he escorts Richard to his home, where he begins to make demands to the police, the local news, and Meridian Mortgage.

What plays out often feels like a contemporary take on Dog Day Afternoon, finding the absurdity of reality, and in seeing crime committed, clumsily, by someone who’s not a criminal (it’s probably not a coincidence that Al Pacino is in both). Gus Van Sant, who directed To Die For, finds time to explore a similar theme of the exploitative nature of news networks. We also get a dash of Vanishing Point, as Colman Domingo, a local DJ named Fred Temple, gets roped into the crime and gets to wax philosophical for his listeners.

The problem is that the detours from the main plot never add up to anything particularly meaningful, even if Domingo does put in one hell of a performance. And the main story isn’t quite interesting enough to sustain a feature-length narrative. At the end of the film, when everything is said and done, it feels like an interesting idea that never fully coalesces.

Dead Man’s Wire is not a bad movie. It’s a good one that could have been great, but feels a bit unfinished, or like an interesting first draft. The cast is good, the story is interesting, and it’s a quintessentially American tale of mental illness and crime, laced with pitch-black humor, but it may have benefited from having a tighter focus on the individual, rather than an analysis of a macrocosm. The story works better as a character study than as a jumping-off point for every other industry that it crosses paths with.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Dead Man’s Wire makes its debut on Blu-ray in a single-disc release, housed in a standard case. The cover artwork has an image of Tony, played by Bill Skarsgård, holding a package containing a shotgun and his dead man’s wire that he will use to kidnap a business executive.

Dead Man’s Wire does a great job evoking its 1970s Midwest setting, emulating the kind of film stock used at the time (even if it’s shot digitally). Cinematographer Arnaud Potier gives the movie a filmic look without leaning into it too heavily, lest it feel like a parody of a time and place, rather than setting the stage for that period. Presented in 1080p HD, it’s a remarkably sharp picture and brilliantly colored in avocado greens and deeply-saturated primaries. The video presentation has a fine layer of grain—whether achieved organically, in-camera, or through post-production, I’m unsure, but in either case it’s convincing enough that the illusion of physical celluloid holds up under scrutiny.

Like its video counterpart, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround mix does a great job of mimicking the front-heavy stereo (or mono) mixes of the era in which it’s set. Most of the action is set firmly on the front-end of the soundstage, although atmospheric effects, like the buzz of the outside world, pipe in through the rears. The satellite speakers see most of their activity through the funk-flavored soundtrack, played through DJ Fred Temple’s radio show, with such greats as Eumir Deodato, Donna Summer, and Roberta Flack. Dead Man’s Wire is a classically talky comedy/drama, so priority is given to dialogue clarity, which is always sharp and favored throughout the mix.

Bummer! There are no special features on this disc. I repeat, there are no special features on this disc!

What I like about Gus Van Sant is that he’s never content to merely make a movie, and he takes some big swings. Sometimes, he’s going to knock it out of the park. Other times, it’s going to be a miss. Dead Man’s Wire represents the filmmaker at both his best and his worst. The good elements are good enough to float it, and the bad elements aren’t terrible, just a sort of tedious distraction from what does work. Dead Man’s Wire may not work completely, but it’s a fascinating story that looks and sounds great, so this Blu-ray release is Recommended.