“McVeigh,” LaPierre’s drama depicting the Oklahoma City Bombing incident by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1995, depicts the bitter world of American resentment hanging around in smaller towns.
A vehicle follows the curve of an empty stretch of road in the eerie dusk. Drunken men are relaxing at road-side bars and strip joints or in its cheap wooden living rooms. And Tim (Alfie Allen), a solitary man so devoid of emotional expression that his unkempt beard comes not as a fashion statement but a deliberate refusal to shave, holds ‘gun show’ selling $2 bumper stickers “When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw.” At home, he has a gun aimed towards the raging TV screen, and like Travis Bickle, pretends to shoot US Attorney General Janet Reno whilst she stands in front of jury recounting events about the FBI standoff of the Branch Davidians at Waco. Additionally, Tim has made a trip to Arkansas prison to meet Richard Wayne Snell (Tracy Letts), an execution-sentenced racially motivated murder accused white supremacist.
Ten years prior, Snell had the ambition to destroy the Federal Building by himself and, during the course of events, an understanding develops between him and McVeigh that Tim will step in, take over and go through with this patriotic endeavor. But this is never really articulated in detail.
There is nothing in “McVeigh” that touches on this however. McVeigh and Snell – this is one of the film’s far too far-reaching premises that even these two were ever in contact – have to “dial their emotions down” in order not to reveal their locations as they are hooked to prison phones, but everybody is expletive in the film, as if it were spook language, talking in a gruff way. There are moments with McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols (Brett Gelman), who provided assistance in the Oklahoma City bombing, but even when they are stacking up jars of nitromethane in a storage shed, they’re relatively quiet about how any of this is going to go down. There is a purpose to the pictures – mechanical, monosyllabic sulk – the recordings of people’s thoughts include – the extreme gap in the documentation between what these people were actually doing – random and psychopathic murders (homicides), absolutely meaningless to anyone, and what they thought they were doing – “the tree of liberty” nurtured by terrorism.
McVeigh makes it appear that there is no friction between Tim and his environment the self-radicalized, deep rural heartland America in the making. While this image does not represent the truth, Timothy McVeigh’s reality a native New Yorker trunked around Arizona, Kansas, and Michigan before settling in back to Arizona mostly since he was trying to find himself. According to a British actor Alfie Allen who was casted as Tim in the series The game of thrones, He plays a convincing role of someone who is defeated and out on most days. Timothy McVeigh, on the other hand, did more than just believe in what he was fighting for. While many don’t pay attention to his letters and other writings, attacking what was or still is happening in America isn’t the only target McVeigh literately entered the battlefield and did what every warrior did speak. In McVeigh’s case, words aren’t spoken in the film. As I mentioned earlier, it really doesn’t fit the theme that Mike Ott was trying to create in the film.
I think that in our time there is such a real-life indie-thriller, a type that describes the lives of infamous killers further proving the fact that we all stand in front of the monsters that are being portrayed through cinematic lenses.
As I look back at those years, there are some movies that stand out, like ‘Dahmer’ (2002) – the movie that transformed Jeremy Renner into a star. ‘Chapter 27’ (2007) which revolves around the ghastly life of Mark David Chapman and ‘Extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile’ (2019) in which Zac Efron absolutely butchered the role of Bundy. These production pieces have sometimes been criticized for their exploitative content but a movie like ‘McVeigh’ is long overdue as it focuses on how the character’s embrace of terrorism was encouraged by the current Alt Right.
It should go without saying that any person who carries out an inhumane act such as the Oklahoma City bombing which resulted in the loss of 168 lives, 19 of whom were children, is mentally disturbed. Instead, McVeigh reveled in right-wing extremism for four years. America’s gun culture: “Guns = Freedom,” he believed in this even though it made no sense because nobody is seriously trying to abolish the Second Amendment; he, like most members of the movement, believed the government’s siege of the Waco compound was an unjustified “invasion,” and he was a martyr surrounded by a lot of rage. All of this is much clearer today than 1995. McVeigh “was just recently adopted,” and “he was grasping at a lot of ideas that were already floating around in America.”
This is something that has been vividly illustrated in such works as the documentary “Oklahoma City” (2017) and Jeffrey Toobin’s “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” (2023). And it is there in “McVeigh,” although the filmmaking makes it largely a non-verbal, passive sort of experience. I hoped we would get to see McVeigh’s arrival at Waco during the siege (it could have made for a great flashback), as a means of showing how he fit into a domestic nihilistic/anarchist/Christian separatist ‘scene.’
Tracy Letts does in fact embody the character of Richard Wayne Snell heavily in the prison conversation with Tim that takes place between them and him; it is very engaging. Still, witness how the drama becomes more and more unclear when Tim, at a gun show, meets the mysterious French Canadian Frédéric (Anthony Carrigan) who then tries to recruit him for…whatever it is that he is recruiting him for. Tim goes to the compound that Frederic is associated with and it seems to be some kind of a family-oriented neo-Nazi sect. But all this doesn’t lead anywhere, and so we are never quite able to understand what purpose it serves in the film.
Tim’s inability to connect with others is reflected in the character of Cindy (Ashley Benson), who likes Tim but has turned him cold after she peers into one of his closed-off spaces. The most associated figure is Terry Nichols, with Brett Gelman bestowing upon him an endearing nervousness, stress particularly kicking in when the time to execute the bombing draws closer. As a matter of fact, he is not capable of doing it which is why it is Tim who eventually goes through with it as a one man operation.
On that morbid morning Tim is seen driving the rented Ryder which is filled with chemical explosives and fertilizer, and the movie simply leaves him at the traffic lights. We never really see him leaving the vehicle by the side of the Federal Building. That is rather a lyrical decision of the director, but coming from “McVeigh”, what I was most concerned with is that for all the foreboding appeal of the atmosphere and of Alfie Allen’s acting, there’s too much that is off the frame.
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