
Based on Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, “McVeigh” tells the story of the anguished and frustrated side of America that most people would rather not know.
An isolated vehicle drives slowly on the barren highway at the end of the day. There’s always someone with a cheap beer sitting in booths in roadside establishments, in strip clubs, or in hideously wooden living rooms. While ‘sitting behind my table at a gun show where I sold two dollar stickers saying ” when guns are outlawed I will be an outlaw “ Tim (Alfie Allen), a disheveled hermit with a sloppy beard, di Wankel, on-screen phone appears. Like Travis Bickle in The Taxi Driver, he picks up a gun and hones in on the TV. He is reenacting the killing of Janet Reno, the Attorney General. He appears at the Waco hearings during the FBI’s siege of the Branch Davidian compound. Tim is in Arkansas where he meets and collaborates with Richard Wayne Snell (Tracy Letts), a white supremacist convicted of two racially charged murders and scheduled for execution.
Last, the understanding between the two is that it won’t actually work, but it is more of a push for either to work harder for the ideals that they uphold as the truth. Whether Timothy McVeigh understands or wishes to manipulate someone like Snell, who I would imagine on most accounts cannot be trusted, going off what is later revealed as the planning and speculation, that would turn crime into a trophy.
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Bailey and McVeigh, and Janet Snell, for that matter, all pull off their plans without a hitch. Vanderpol pulled off his act by simply looking miserable on the phone with James Snell, and maybe even Janette as well, wherever she was at the time. As Snell painstakingly outlines in the documentary, he for some reason felt this benevolence out of it and thought he knew all about the couple. Nothing suggests or, or reinforces their positions on this subject, and yet they do seem strangely adamant about it. Despite the lack of trait culpability, there was absolute constant stress, creating the whole environment Lynch calls sociopathy; transforming them into “doers”, given nothing but await instructions.
As “McVeigh” plays out, one thinks of Tim as a product of his environment the lonely rural heart of America that had now started shedding its pro-American outlook. However, that image, I am aware, is not in many aspects the truth about Timothy McVeigh, who was born and raised in New York State, for instance. He became quite the active drifter, and moved from Arizona to Kansas to Michigan and back to Arizona, all in search of something. According to Alfie Allen, the British actor playing Tim, the man appears to suffer from frustration and anger caused by being lost, which seems to be what Tim was, but McVeigh, in his letters and et cetera was saying clearly what he thought was happening to America and I have to assume that these phrases came out of him, sometimes quite extensively. But that never happens in the film, as director Mike Ott believes it would interfere with the desolate-row atmosphere that he is trying to achieve with the film.
There is, at this point, a sort of Man Bites Dog pandemic style in which true-life numinosity captures the mindset of infamous killers, wherein the focus is subjective and directs us to occupy the minds of the horrendous killers instead.
Some of the movies that come to my mind include ‘Dahmer’ where Jeremy Renner rose to fame, ‘Chapter 27’ which features Mark David Chapman, and ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ where Zac Efron shines as Ted Bundy. These can be viewed as a form of exploitation at times. However, there is a great need for a movie like McVeigh, which depicts how a man became a terrorist due to extreme rightist thinking.
Some, however, would argue that Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people (including 19 children) in the Oklahoma City bombing, must be mentally insane. Some thought it would be useful to appeal to McVeigh since he spent years on the outskirts of the new right-wing extremism. There were a number of oppressive views that gun ownership equals freedom notions, aka fundamental and xenophobic ideas, ideas that there was no need to be paranoid considering no one on the other side wanted to take away the Right to Bear Arms. The mass attack on the Second Amendment, the thought that David Koresh is some kind of hero and the siege of Waco was an illegal place, which began with him igniting chimneys on the roof of a building filled with women and children protected by cult law. It would be repeated in 1995. However, it is even more outrageous today than it was in 1995 that McVeigh was drawing his inspiration from a school of thought that seemed increasingly Americanized.
This is something that has been best articulated in simulations such as the Documentary ‘Oklahoma City’ (2017) or Jeffrey Toobin’s ‘Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism’ (2023). And there’s some of that here in ‘McVeigh,’ although that’s something the film actively chooses to convey in a non-verbal manner. I really want to see (okay, wish) McVeigh at Waco during the siege because that would have been an awesome flashback and would have depicted how he drew from the homegrown nihilist/anarchist/Christian-separatist community.
There was a sense of conscious performance for Richard Wayne Snell that Tracy Letts domain; the prison talk between him and Tim is electric. But this is where the intrigue further gets muddied because at a gun show, Tim comes across the French-Canadian Frédéric who seems to be quite the enigma (Anthony Carrigan) and then he goes on to recruit Tim for… something. Tim goes to the compound that Frédéric seems to be linked to, which looks like some kind of a family-style neo-nazi cult. But none of this leads to much so we never fully figure out what it is doing in the film.
Cindy (Ashley Benson)’s infatuation with Tim is clogged by Tim’s persistent rejection after Cindy invades his privacy by opening one of his locked rooms, thus representing Tim’s inability to relating with people. He seems the most engaged with Terry Nichols who, as portrayed by Brett Gelman, has an interesting and touching sense of nervousness, especially during the time when the bombing is planned. He literally doesn’t have that drive, and that’s the reason why Tim had to carry out this order in an isolated situation.
On that unfortunate day, we observe Tim behind the wheel of a rented Ryder truck filled with tonnes of ammonium nitrate and other chemicals, and the movie halts at a red signal. He is never shown bringing the truck alongside the Federal Building. That is very eloquent and is entirely the discretion of the filmmaker, but from the experience of “McVeigh,” what struck me the most is that however Di Palma and Alfie Allen created an ominous atmosphere, there is far too much that is unstated.
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