TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

Tony hoped to rally public support for his cause via his favourite radio DJ, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), who’s introduced mouth-first in Dead Man’s Wire like Lynne Thigpen in The Warriors. Temple is by far the most engaging character here–the city’s Cool Dad, who maybe finds it a bit titillating to be swept up in this drama–but can only grace the film with his presence so many times because Tony’s appearance on Temple’s show proved profoundly immaterial to the outcome of his crusade. Arguably, the better movie views all this white-boy nonsense from the perspective of a Black man uniquely connected to the pulse of the city through radio, but Van Sant is chasing his very own Dog Day Afternoon, complete with an extended cameo from Pacino as a miserly tycoon in the John Paul Getty mold. (Indeed, Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World is a film Van Sant could’ve only improved.) Dead Man’s Wire has some of that Dog Day electricity up front but is too low-stakes and underpopulated to sustain it, no matter how many multimedia you-are-there inserts Van Sant cuts to from news crews and the like. The camera also favours Dick over Tony, visceralizing his ordeal with tight close-ups that capture the abject misery beneath his stoic expression like an X-ray. Van Sant and screenwriter Austin Kolodney see fit to furnish Dick with fakeout nightmares and touch on his daddy issues while evincing no such curiosity about his kidnapper’s innermost self. Though Tony may be righteous, he’s increasingly framed as a crackpot, undermining the character’s timely stand–almost anachronistic-feeling in context–against private equity and any that Dead Man’s Wire is making in solidarity. Perhaps Van Sant spent too much time in the company of Capote and the Swans to remember that the rich are for eating.

Like their recent star-studded flop A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, A24’s Eternity is a high-concept romcom straining to deepfake the soul of Charlie Kaufman. If they were the edgy studio they purport themselves to be, they’d hire the real Kaufman, who’s been struggling to finance another feature since 2020’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, instead of trawling The Black List for the Temu equivalent. The picture opens with Larry and Joan (Barry Primus and Betty Buckley) bickering like the old married couple they are on their way to their grandchild’s Gender Reveal party, which they’re lucky enough to mostly miss. Curiously, director David Freyne fills the scene with ominous portents–a container of pretzels, an IV port–as though we came to see a Final Destination movie, and I kept wondering how bizarre and agrammatical the cutting would seem if you had zero familiarity with Eternity‘s premise. Larry is the first to expire and cross over into the Afterlife, where he assumes the form of his younger self (Miles Teller); turns out that when you die, you revert to the age at which you were happiest. Everyone in this gateway to the next life, a veritable travel and tourism fair, gets a week to choose their forever home from among the various nostalgic “worlds” on display. Yes, the After Life parallels are shameless. (For what it’s worth, the throwback WPA-style posters decorating the stalls, including one for the now-shuttered Clown World, provide the biggest laughs in the film.) When Joan finally shows up looking like Elizabeth Olsen, her taking a permanent vacation with Larry is a foregone conclusion–until, that is, she locks eyes with hunky bartender Luke (Callum Turner), her first husband, who was killed in the Korean War and has waited here for Joan to rejoin him for 67 years.

The thing about Charlie Kaufman is that he’s more or less an expressionist, suspending disbelief by pursuing an emotional truth. If there’s an heir to his crown, it might be Nathan Fielder, whose compulsions drive him to stress-test the fault lines in his ridiculous notions. Once established, Eternity‘s love triangle offers no further turns of the screw: Joan must simply pick a lane. Most of the world-building is accomplished through a surfeit of exposition from Larry and Joan’s caseworkers, Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early), respectively, that only amplifies the unsaid–with the caveat being that I am deaf as a post and may have missed a line of dialogue or ten. But why aren’t Larry and Joan’s handlers better prepared for this eventuality? Which is to say, surely Joan having a second husband in her past isn’t setting any precedents. Why do Anna and Ryan appear to be the lone handlers for this bustling floor? If you return to the form of your happiest self, where are all the children and prom queens and high-school quarterbacks? Note that Eternity‘s In-Between is even more crassly American than the consumer paradise of Defending Your Life: a liquor-licensed, understaffed restaurant with an unruly menu but narrow options for ordering, complete with a fascist, faceless police force–think THX 1138–lying in wait to discipline the rule-breakers. I’m reminded of the “Cheers” episode where Woody converts to Lutheranism for his wife, and she says, “Now when we go to Heaven we won’t be separated by barbed wire and barking dogs!” Every generation gets the A Matter of Life and Death it deserves, I guess. Dead Man’s Wire – Programme: Special Presentations; Eternity – Programme: Gala Presentations