A still from ‘Song Sung Blue’.
| Photo Credit: Focus Features/YouTube

In 1977, a man named Tony Kiritsis fell behind on mortgage payments for an Indianapolis, Indiana, property that he hoped to develop into an affordable shopping center for independent merchants. He asked his mortgage broker for more time, but was denied. This enraged him because he suspected that the broker and his father, who owned the company, were conspiring to defraud him by letting the property go into foreclosure and acquire it for much less than market value. He showed up at the offices of the mortgage company, Meridian, for a scheduled appointment regarding the debt in the broker’s office, where he took the broker, Richard O. Hall, hostage, and demanded $130,000 to settle the debt, plus a public apology from the company. He carried a long cardboard box containing a shotgun with a so-called dead man’s wire, which he affixed to Hall as a precaution against police interference: if either of them were shot, tackled, or even caused to stumble, the wire would pull the trigger, blowing Hall’s head off.

That’s only the beginning of an astonishing story that has inspired many retellings, including a memoir by Hall, a 2018 documentary (whose producers were consultants on this movie) and a podcast drama starring Jon Hamm as Tony Kiritsis. And now it’s the best current movie you likely haven’t heard about—a drama from director Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), starring Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall. It’s unabashedly inspired by the best crime dramas from the 1970s, including “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Network,” and “Badlands,” and can stand proudly alongside them.

From the opening sequence, which scores the high-strung Tony’s pre-crime prep with Deodato’s immortally groovy disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” played on the radio by one of Tony’s local heroes, the philosophical DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo); through the expansive middle section, which establishes Tony as part of a thriving community that will see him as their representative in the one-sided struggle between labor and capital; through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nostalgia trip of the best kind. Rather than superficially imitate the style of a specific type of ’70s drama, Van Sant and his collaborators connect with the essence of what made them powerful and memorable: their connection to issues that weighed on viewers’ minds fifty years ago and that have grown heavier since.

Tony is far from a criminal genius or a potential folk hero, but thinks he’s both. The shotgun box with a weird bulge, barely held together with packing tape, is a correlative of the mentality of the man who carries it. His home is filled with counterculture-adjacent books, but he’s a slob who loudly gripes during a brief car ride that his “shorts have been ridin’ up since Market Street,” and has a vanity license plate that reads “TOPLESS.” His eloquence runs the gamut from Everyman acuity to self-canceling nonsense slathered in profanity . He accurately sums up the mortgage company’s practices as “a private equity trap” (a phrase that looks ahead to the 2008 financial collapse, which was sparked by predatory lending on subprime mortgages) and hopes that his extreme actions will generate some “some goddamn catharsis” for himself and his fellow citizens, and “some genuine guilt” among Indianapolis’ lending class.

He’s also intoxicated by his sudden local fame. The hostage situation migrates from the mortgage company to Tony’s shabby apartment complex, which is quickly surrounded by beat cops, tactical officers, and reporters (including Myha’La as Linda Page, a twenty-something, Black local TV correspondent looking to move up. Tony also forces his way into the life of his idol Temple, who tapes a phone conversation with him, previews it for police, and grudgingly accepts their or-else request to continue the dialog and plays their regular talks on his morning show.

Despite these inroads, Tony is unable to prevent his inner petty schmuck from emerging and undermining his message, such as it is. He vacillates between treating Hall as a useless representative of the financial elite (when the elder Hall finally agrees to speak with Tony via phone from a tropical vacation, Tony sneers to Hall the younger, “Your daddy’s on the line—he wants to know when you’ll be home for supper!”) and connecting with him on a human level. When he’s not bombastic, he’s needy and fawning. “I like you!” he keeps telling people he just met, but Fred most of all—as if a Black man who’d built a comfortable life for himself and his wife in 1977 Indiana could say no when an overwhelmingly white police force asked him to become Tony’s fake-confidant; and as if it matters whether a hostage-taking gunman feels warmly towards him.

Ultimately, though, making perfect sense and effecting lasting change are no higher on Tony’s agenda than they were for the protagonists of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.” Like them, these are unhinged audience surrogates whose media stardom turned them into human megaphones for anger at the miserable state of things, and the indifference of institutions that caused or worsened it. These include local law enforcement, which—to paraphrase hapless bank robber Sonny Wirtzik taunting cops in “Dog Day Afternoon”—wanna kill Tony so bad that they can taste it. The discussions between Indianapolis police and the FBI (represented by Neil Mulac’s Agent Patrick Mullaney, a straight-outta-Quantico robot) are all about how to set up and take the kill shot.

The aforementioned phone call leads to a gut-wrenching moment that echoes the then-recent kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, when hostage-takers called their victim’s wealthy grandfather to arrange ransom payment, and got nickel-and-dimed as if they were trying to sell him a used car. The elder Hall is played by “Dog Day Afternoon” star Al Pacino, inspired casting that not only officially connects Tony with Wirtzik but proves that, at 85, Pacino can still bring the heat. The character’s presence creeps into the rest of the story like a toxic fog, even when he’s not the subject of conversation.

With his frizzy grey toupee, self-satisfied Midwest twang, and punchable smirk, Pacino is skin-crawlingly perfect as an old man who built a fortune on being good at one thing, but thinks that makes him a fountain of wisdom on all things, including the conduct of Real Men in a land of women and sissies. After watching TV coverage of Tony getting emotional while keeping his shotgun on Richard, Jr., he beams with pride that Tony shed tears but his own son didn’t. (Kelly Lynch, who costarred in another classic Van Sant film about American losers, “Drugstore Cowboy,” plays Richard, Sr.’s trophy wife, who is appalled at being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her husband’s monstrousness, but still won’t say a word against him.)

Van Sant was 25 during the real-life incidents that inspired this movie. That may partly account for the physical realism of the production, which doesn’t feel created but merely observed, in the manner of ’70s movies whose authenticity was strengthened by letting the main characters’ dialogue overlap and compete with ambient sounds; shooting in existing locations when possible, and dressing the actors in clothes that looked as if they’d been hanging in regular folks’ closets for years. Peggy Schnitzer did the costumes, Stefan Dechant the production design, and Arnaud Poiter the cinematography, all of which figuratively wear bell-bottom pants and platform shoes; the soundscape was overseen by Leslie Schatz, who keeps the environments believably dense and filled with incidental sounds while making sure the important stuff can be understood. It should also be mentioned that the film’s blueprint is an original script by a first-timer, Adam Kolodny, with a bona-fide working class worldview; he wrote it while working as a custodian at the Los Angeles Zoo.

More impressive than the film’s behind-the-scenes pedigree is its vision of another time that unexpectedly comes to seem not too different from this one. It is both a lovingly constructed time machine highlighting details that now seem as antiquated as lithography and buckboard wagons (the film deserves a special Oscar just for its phones) and a wide-ranging consideration of indestructible realities of life in the United States, which are highlighted in such a way that you notice them without feeling as if the movie pointed at them.

For instance, consider Tony’s infatuation with Fred Temple, which peaks when Tony honors his hero by demonstrating his “soul dancing” for his hostage, is a pre-Internet version of what we would now call a “parasocial relationship.” An awareness of racial dynamics is baked into this, and into the film as a whole. Domingo’s performance as Temple captures the tightrope walk that Black celebrities have to pull off, reassuring their most excitable white fans that they understand and care about them without cosigning condescension or behavior that could escalate into harassment. Consider, too, the matter-of-fact presentation of how easy it is for violence-prone people to buddy up to law enforcement officers, especially when they inhabit the same spaces. When Indianapolis police detective Will Grable (Cary Elwes) approaches Tony on a public street soon after the kidnapping, Tony’s face brightens as he exclaims, “Hi Mike! Nice to see you!”

And then, of course, there’s the economic and political framework, which is built with a firm yet delicate hand, and compassion for the vibrant messiness of life. “Dead Man’s Wire” depicts an analog era in which crises like this one were treated as important local matters that involved local people, businesses, and government agents, rather than fuel for a global agitprop industry posing as a news media, and a parasitic army of self-proclaimed influencers reycling the work of other influencers for clout. Van Sant’s movie continually insists on the uniqueness and value of every life shown onscreen, however briefly glimpsed, from the many unnamed citizens who are shown silently watching news coverage of the crisis while working their day jobs, to Fred’s right hand at the radio station, an Asian-American stoner dude (Vinh Nguyen) with a closet-sized office who talent-scouts unknown bands while exhaling cumulus clouds of pot smoke.

All this is drawn together by Van Sant and editor Saar Klein in pop music-driven montages that show how every member of the community depicted in this story is connected, even if they don’t know it or refuse to admit it. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Each is a piece of the continent/A part of the main.” The struggle of the individual is summed up in one of Fred’s hypnotic radio monologues: “Let’s remember to become the ocean, not disappear into it.”

Prabhas-starrer ‘The Raja Saab’ is currently running in theaters; the much-awaited film was released today. The early reviews of the Maruthi-directed film have been receiving mixed to negative reviews on social media. However, a netizen has claimed that the makers of the film offered him money to delete his negative review.

Netizen alleges bribe by the makers

On Friday morning, an X user named @BS__unfiltered posted a screenshot online. He said he received a message from the official account of ‘The Raja Saab’ after posting his review. According to him, the film’s team offered him Rs 14,000. They reportedly asked him to post a positive review of the movie instead. Sharing the screenshot, the user wrote, “What the hell mannnnn!!!! They are offering me money to delete this!!! Nahi hoga delete #TheRajaSaab #Prabhas.” However, the screenshot shared by the user is in question for its authenticity and is not verified. At this time, it is not clear if the message was real or AI-generated. The claim is still unconfirmed.See More: The Raja Saab: Movie Review and Release Live Updates: Prabhas’ film to open big at the box office

Fans share their opinions online

Fans and netizens have been active on social media, sharing their opinions about the film. While some enjoyed it, many expressed disappointment. Another internet user wrote, “A horror-fantasy with a good idea but weak execution. Prabhas gives an energetic & comical performance, & the face-off with Sanjay Dutt is the main highlight. The palace setting is interesting at first, but the messy screenplay, dragged 2nd half, uneven VFX, & weak emotional payoff reduce the impact. @MusicThaman’s music & sounding are one of the positives. From the end of the first half, the story becomes slightly interesting. There are 3 songs featuring Prabhas & @AgerwalNidhhi. Nidhhi has performed well. Some scenes feel unintentionally funny, & the climax fails to impress. Overall, a one-time watch at best. This film gives a lead for The Raja Saab Circus—1935 (Part 2), where we may see Prabhas vs. Prabhas.”

About ‘The Raja Saab’

‘The Raja Saab’ is directed and written by Maruthi. The film stars Prabhas in the lead role. The cast also includes Malavika Mohanan, Nidhhi Agerwal, Riddhi Kumar, Sanjay Dutt, and Boman Irani.