Producers: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Martin McDonagh and Anita Overland Director: Martin McDonagh Screenplay: Martin McDonagh Cast: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Mariana Di Girólamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits, Parker Posey and Paola Giannini Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Grade: B
With his fifth film writer-director Martin McDonagh in some ways circles back to his first, “In Bruges” (2008), which found two Irish hitmen (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell) lying not-so-low in the medieval Belgian city after bungling a job back home. But the dark reality of local murder, even with religious overtones, now expands to political assassination on a global scale.
In “Wild Horse Nine,” John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play Chris and Lee, a pair of CIA agents spending a brief vacation on Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, a locale that cinematographer Ben Davis’ camera swoons over with a luxuriousness that should make the tourism board jump with joy. (Carter Burwell’s flavorful score adds to the effect.) The year is 1973, and they’re part of the crew stationed in Santiago preparing the operation designed to oust leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende from power.
Wild horses roam the island, home to the ancient monumental statues called the moai (or “Big Heads” to the boys), but though one of them plays a symbolic role in McDonagh’s characteristic blend of tragedy and dark farce, the central figure is a wild card who’s human—Chris, a loose cannon liable to blurt out uncomfortable truths about the agency’s upcoming coup as well as past assassinations he’s participated in, including one a decade earlier. The thought that Chris will reveal what he knows about that operation, deliberately or inadvertently, and perhaps disclose evidence about it he still possesses, terrifies station chief MJ (Steve Buscemi), who insists that Lee resolve the problem despite the men’s long friendship.
There’s a further wrinkle in that Chris is terminally ill and determined to die on his own terms. But he’s a cradle Catholic, and though hardly devout, can’t bring himself to commit a mortal sin by killing himself. So he’s convinced Lee to do the deed, and chosen Easter Island as the proper venue for it, although since they’re now in situ, he’s musing that he might prefer Venice.
At some points Lee takes center stage, particularly when he hears from his estranged wife Marge (Parker Posey), who’s hysterical over a break-in at her house and threats to their children, which represent, he presumes, warnings from MJ as to what might happen if he fails to deal with the danger Chris poses to the agency. Lee is similarly in the forefront when he discovers that Rosa (Paola Giannini), the clerk at the hotel where he and Chris are staying, is spying on them for MJ. Lee deals with such matters without breaking a sweat.
Rockwell handles both aspects of the role with ease, combining concern over his partner’s physical and mental deterioration with a cocky certitude that he’ll be able to handle whatever problems arise along the way.
But it’s Malkovich’s Chris who dominates the proceedings, and the actor seizes every opportunity the script affords, adding to his gift for the sardonic more than a touch of poignance, whether it be in contacting his long-alienated brother (Tom Waits), who lives a reclusive existence in Colorado’s Monument Valley, or in his growing protectiveness toward Monica (Mariana di Girolamo), an American college student he initially frightens (along with her Chilean traveling companion Alicia, played by Ailín Salas) with suggestions about leaving Chile to avoid suffering when the coup against Allende occurs but later befriends on the island. She’s genuinely moved by the shy, vulnerable side he occasionally shows, even as he sometimes explodes over trivialities, as when he loudly berates an English couple (John Heffernan and Poppy O’Shaughnessy), sitting at a nearby dinner table in a restaurant, who inform him that the statues he keeps calling “Big Heads” are actually referred to by the indigenous population as the moai.
McDonagh brings all the elements of his plot together in a finale that combines action, violence, tension and humor in approximately equal doses. The finale gives Malkovich an farewell that brings together the contrasting elements of the character in an extended rhapsody that the actor savors, but also gives others—Rockwell, Buscemi, Girolamo and Salas—a chance of shine, if not to the same extent.
It’s certainly true that what McDonagh has contrived here, using assassination as the fulcrum of his narrative—and not in the slapstick fashion of some Ealing-esque comedy—will strike some viewers as tasteless, especially as the assassinations are real ones, not fictions, and are recent enough as to remain painful memories for many (and events still subject to conspiratorial speculation).
But an edgy combination of farce and tragedy, jokes and nastiness, is McDonagh’s métier, and though “Wild Horse Nine” might not be the best example of his peculiar specialty, it has far more strengths than weaknesses, especially since Malkovich, Rockwell and Buscemi are on hand to elevate even the lesser material and mitigate the occasional bumps in Mikkei E.G. Nielsen’s editing.
The result is a film that tests the boundaries of sharp-edged tragicomedy, but develops a feeling of autumnal melancholy that Malkovich captures marvelously in a perfectly pitched performance, a highlight of his distinguished career.