Wild Horse Nine
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes
Stars: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi
Writer/Director: Martin McDonagh
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Whenever awards season rolls around, everybody seems to forget about John Malkovich. Just two Oscar nominations – the last one 30 years ago – no Emmy nominations in the past quarter century…the list of snubs goes on and on.
This year’s Best Actor Oscar race is especially rich, but if there is justice under the Hollywood sign, Malkovich will get an emphatic thumbs-up for the dark comedy Wild Horse Nine, a film in which he unleashes a master class retrospective of the qualities that make him one of our most essential screen actors.
Malkovich plays Chris, a CIA agent who specializes in destabilizing regimes unfriendly to the U.S. It’s 1973, the country is Chile, and along with his partner and friend Lee (Sam Rockwell), Chris is laying the groundwork for the violent overthrow of that country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende.
But as he schemes with military leaders for the coup d’etat that he knows will result in thousands of innocent deaths, Chris is preoccupied: For one thing, he’s dying of lung cancer, and has, at best, a month or so to live. For another, before he dies Chris wants Lee to take him to visit Easter Island, just off the Chilean coast. (“You know,” he says, “the big heads.”) And for yet another thing, Chris’s boss in Santiago (Steve Buscemi) needs Lee to extract from Chris, before he dies, the location of a particular weapon that may or may not have been used in a certain CIA-initiated assassination in Dallas 10 years earlier.
That’s the set-up, and after that the movie belongs to Malkovich, who unleashes a character of confounding contradictions: Chris has personally executed dozens of people in his line of work, yet he obsesses over the well-being of moths in his hotel room. He’d prefer to kill himself before his disease takes its gruesome course, but his Roman Catholic upbringing causes him to fear going to Hell as a result. He wants to charm a pair of young women he and Lee meet on their travels, but he can’t help regaling them with the grim plans he has for their country.
In just about any other actor’s hands, Chris would be a cartoonish patchwork of clashing colors, a darkly malevolent monster with either a surprising soft side or a milquetoast softie with a barely-concealed savage streak. Malkovich, on the other hand, seamlessly weaves the conflicting threads of Chris into a wholly understandable creation: Chris has convinced himself that his relative handful of murders has made the world safer for countless millions. He firmly believes he is a humanitarian at heart. And so, Malkovich’s Chris wanders easily from cold-blooded killer to moth saver to charming dinner companion to pronouncer of grisly doom. Always with that inscrutable, tight-lipped smile; always with those narrow eyes that seem to be dissecting you where you stand. Malkovich has, from Dangerous Liaisons to The New Pope, infused his characters with individual elements of Chris’s faceted personality – here he works actorly alchemy to blend them all into one confounding guy, someone we want to see more and more of if only to discover what he’s going to show us next.
There is no screen presence more welcome than Sam Rockwell’s, and as Chris’s friend/fellow disruptor Lee, he provides a pleasing sounding board for Chris’s rants and observations. Lee, too, lives a highly compartmentalized life, but even as the film occasionally tries to misdirect us, his genuine affection for Chris fairly glows. Rockwell gets the film’s funniest scenes, bickering over long-distance lines with his estranged, flagrantly cheating, yet confusingly devoted wife, played with wide-eyed, big-mouthed aplomb by Parker Posey. Steve Buscemi gets to do his exasperated guy bit, which nobody on planet Earth does better, playing the CIA bureau chief with all the huffing frustration of a harried Game Stop manager.
Even if his name never appeared on the screen, anyone could guess Wild Horse Nine was written and directed by Martin McDonagh, who raised the skill of defining quirky protagonists to high art in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and who re-defined buddy movies with his dysfunctional masterpieces In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin. He is joined once again by his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Ben Davis, whose vision of Easter Island as a lushly forbidding landscape punctuated by hillsides of always-watching sentinels will doubtless put the place on a lot of people’s bucket lists.
For sure, I want to go there. And I wouldn’t even mind visiting with a couple of burnt-out assassins.
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