McDonagh's pleasurable blend of genre hijinks and masculinity-in-crisis introspection is a touch familiar by now — but not to Malkovich, who seizes the filmmaker's salty dialogue like an actor reborn. More often than not, a Martin McDonagh script sets out like the start of a joke. Two Irishmen meet in a pub, a hangman and a stranger meet in a pub, two hitmen go on holiday to Belgium, a man searches for his missing left hand, a woman purchases three billboards.
McDonagh likes a well-told joke, and his films and plays are rife with them. But the scripts overall tend to swerve and sour before arriving at a punchline: His films, in particular, are frequently very funny, but they don’t tend to leave you laughing. So it proves again in “Wild Horse Nine,” starting with a joke opener practically patched together at random from other McDonagh loglines — two CIA agents go on holiday to Easter Island — and ending with a small lump in the throat.
That’s the clever, bittersweet trick of McDonagh’s writing, time and again, though in this case, much credit for the lump goes to John Malkovich. Not typically the most emotionally demonstrative of actors, he doesn’t stray far outside his dry, laconic wheelhouse in this drolly melancholic tale of two ugly Americans in a Chile on the cusp of military rule, reckoning with the fascistic influence of their presence and past, and with terminal disease besides. But as a veteran spy fucking the system as he stares death in the face, Malkovich — in his first collaboration with the writer-director — gives McDonagh’s pithy, tangy dialogue just the sad, soulful eccentricity that it needs to live off the page.
Where the film, enjoyable and puckish as ever, gets just a little too neat, the actor’s hoarsely wounded, seen-it-all performance untidies things a little. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this actor — too often squandered on rent-a-villain roles or Europudding ensemble duty — this engaged and affecting, in a part this perfectly tailored to his weary, wary onscreen demeanor. (That eye-rolling impatience with the world that he tends to project yields rewards both comic and tragic here.) But it’s also a while since he was matched with a partner as warmly responsive as Sam Rockwell, essentially the faintly offbeat straight man to Malkovich’s wholly loose cannon: “Wild Horse Nine” is as irreverent and ultimately mournful a buddy movie as “In Bruges” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” again probing the faultlines of male friendship with equal parts vulgarity and grace. At 72, Chris Carlisle (Malkovich) has had what in his profession counts as a pretty good run, spanning a few decades of service to the agency on some of their highest-profile midcentury missions: “Guatemala, successful.
Bay of Pigs, less successful,” he recounts, exquisitely deadpan, into the dictaphone where he’s storing memories for the memoirs he’d vaguely like to write. But his heart’s not in it anymore, not least because late-stage cancer is eating away at his body, and early-stage dementia his mind. The year is 1973, and he and Lee Chesterfield (Rockwell), his fellow agent and only friend, are stationed in Santiago, Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende has been newly elected — though not for long, as Chris and Lee are both all too aware.
The brewing military coup is their primary professional interest, of course, significantly enabled as it is by the Nixon administration. But their thoughts are elsewhere — specifically on Easter Island, the remote Chilean territory in the Southeastern Pacific, seemingly populated with as many wild horses as people, and famed for its numerous imposing moai statues. (Or “the big heads,” as Chris calls them, irritated by the native term.) It’s a place, Chris claims, that he’s always wanted to see before dying, and with death coming sooner rather than later, Lee agrees to accompany him on a week’s vacation there. Of course, this being a McDonagh caper, everyone’s motivations are a little more complicated than that — as Chris sporadically has to remind himself, with notes in his pocket regarding who can and can’t be trusted.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
