Recxpectations: Dead Man's Wire

Maybe I missed it, but I felt that it was a little odd that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were doing pretty much every media outing possible - my friend said he saw them opening Pokemon cards online at one point - yet I never saw them give a shout out to Gus Van Sant, whose first film in seven years, “Dead Man’s Wire” opens wide this week. I know that there’s obviously some competition for eyeballs but I feel like they could have given him a little bit out of shout out.

Anyway, “Dead Man’s Wire” is based on the true story of a man in the 70s who took the President of a mortgage company hostage and became a folk hero as he railed against the greed and shady dealings that were eating away at everyday people’s savings.

There are obvious parallels to modern day - Luigi Mangione being the first one but also private equity which has been buying up companies like Saks in order to get their land and then they pull a mafia-esque move of running up the debt until the company has to file bankruptcy.

EXPECT: A MOVIE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A DOCUMENTARY
This is one of those films that pretty much has a trailer’s worth of story and you just kind of see a more fleshed out version when you sit down for the full hour and forty-five minutes. The incident itself is crazy but there is actual footage of much of it and I’m not sure that getting an inside look of what was happening in the apartment when the cameras were out of reach makes for the most interesting investigation of the incident And to beef up the story, there’s a completely unnecessary, half-baked b-story about a local reporter trying to get her big break. Ultimately, this is a crazy story that doesn’t really build. It starts off as crazy and then doesn’t really go anywhere. Oddly or maybe fittingly, it’s similar to The Testament of Ann Lee in that way. The path to becoming a prophet or folk hero is a lot more interesting than trying to maintain the position.

EXPECT: WEIRD ACCENTS
Maybe the accents were true to the characters and true to Indiana but I have to wonder, why worry about nailing the accents when the actors look NOTHING like the real participants. I also feel like everyone had a different accent. Cary Elwes was unrecognizable in his role but it might have been because I was wondering where his accent came from.

EXPECT: A JARRING EPILOGUE
The epilogue of the film enters an entirely different discussion into the mix and I immediately thought that perhaps the focus of the epilogue should have been present far earlier. I think one major issue with a film like this is you kind of have to decide between playing up the tension of What is going to happen? vs. digging deep into what happened and why. Gus Van Sant seems to have gone for the former so, for me, it felt like watching a mere reenactment more than a film that had much of a statement of its own.