Wild Horse Nine Review: Martin McDonagh Does It Again
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Martin McDonagh doesn't need much. Give him a few of the best actors working, a script with real bite, and an isolated place where people can say terrible things to each other, and he tends to make something great. Wild Horse Nine has all three, and I loved it.
What it's about
It's 1973, and Chile is weeks away from the coup that overthrew its elected president, Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to win a free vote for the presidency in Latin America. The US wanted him gone, and the CIA is on the ground in Santiago to help destabilize the government and the country.
Two CIA officers, a gruff veteran and his younger partner, get sent from Santiago to Easter Island. On paper it's a vacation. In practice, their boss (Steve Buscemi) wants them out of the way before things start moving. The veteran is erratic, blurts out things he shouldn't, and has been talking about writing a memoir, which makes some people very nervous.
Searchlight Pictures releases it in the US and UK on November 6, after its Venice premiere in September.
Malkovich carries it
I'm a big John Malkovich fan, and I'll say it plainly: this is the best performance I've seen from him. He can ham it up. In the Red movies he plays a CIA operative who is a lot of fun and more than a little hammy. Here it's a similar kind of man, but played dead serious and somber. It's still a funny movie, because the fireworks between him and Sam Rockwell, who plays the younger partner, are what drive it. Malkovich carries most of the weight, and he makes it look easy.
The script is the star
McDonagh's dialogue is the draw. There are plenty of lines that could become classics, and they reminded me of how people talk in old Westerns. I'd bet he's a big Western fan.
The one drawback is the look of it. McDonagh comes from theater, and I'd love a bit more visual flair in the camera movement. He isn't taking many risks there because he trusts his actors to do everything, and he's right to. It still looks great. And the formula works so well that it's hard to call it a real complaint: he writes a good script, lets the cast go, and that's all you need.
Yes, it echoes Banshees
The Banshees of Inisherin is the last McDonagh film I saw, and I loved it. (I still need to catch In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, which people keep recommending.) Wild Horse Nine recycles a few of its themes: an isolated island, a conflict between friends, and a bond between a hard man and animals. In Banshees, the war stayed across the water, far from the characters. Here, everyone is directly involved in the political situation. I'll forgive the repetition because the script is this good.
Verdict
Highly recommended. I'd watch it again. Malkovich should be in the awards conversation, and it would be a shame if he isn't. Best Picture is a harder sell, and the reason is a big one. It's in the spoiler section below, so stop here if you haven't seen the film.
Spoilers below
Last chance to turn back.
The Easter Island trip isn't a vacation. Malkovich's character is dying, probably of something like brain cancer, and he's a Catholic who believes that if he kills himself he goes to hell. So he wants his younger partner to do it for him. He keeps forgetting why they're on the island, and Rockwell has to remind him that he was given six months to live. He asks how long ago that was. Six months. The code word is Arkansas.
He hasn't spoken to his brother in ten years, and the reason is an argument about the JFK assassination, which he apparently had a hand in. In the film's world, the CIA was involved, and after the shot was fired, the assassin handed him the rifle. He hid it and held on to it for years as leverage. Back in Santiago, the boss wants to know where that rifle is and has someone digging through the memoir file for any mention of Dallas. It's been with him the whole time, in a suitcase.
The film keeps you guessing on whether he's really losing his memory or playing it up to fool everyone. By the end you know he really is dying. These men are death merchants, so a lot of the movie is about life and death, and it's sad and serious for it.
The animal thread pays off like it did in Banshees, where Colin Farrell's character has a bond with an animal and then it dies. Here, a stone-cold killer develops a bond with the wild horses on Easter Island, and when one dies, it sets off a change in him.
That's also why I doubt this gets a Best Picture nomination. The movie asks you to accept that the US had a hand in the JFK assassination and an active role in the Chilean coup. It'll be interesting to see how that plays once awards season gets here.