“ McVeigh ,” a drama about Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, is a movie rooted in the forlorn underbelly of small-town American rage. A car snakes its way along an empty road in the desolate dusk.
Men nursing cheap beers sit around in roadside bars, strips clubs, or living rooms with ugly wood paneling. And Tim (Alfie Allen), an impassive loner whose scraggly beard is an outgrowth of his not bothering to shave, sits behind his table at a gun show, hawking $2 bumper stickers that say “When guns are outlawed, I will become an outlaw.” At home, he points a weapon at the TV set, like Travis Bickle, miming the execution of the U.
S. Attorney General Janet Reno as she testifies at hearings about the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. Tim also travels to an Arkansas prison to visit Richard Wayne Snell (Tracy Letts), a white supremacist who is about be executed for a pair of homicides, both racially motivated.
Snell, more than 10 years before, had planned to blow up the Federal Building himself, and an understanding gradually passes between him and McVeigh that Tim is going to pick up the mantle and finally accomplish this “patriotic” act. But it’s never said very explicitly. Nothing in “McVeigh” is.
McVeigh and Snell — it’s one of the film’s conjectures that these two were ever in contact — have to keep their sentiments on the down-low, because they’re talking on prison phones, b.
