Some people say that filmmakers don’t make different movies, they just make different versions of the same movie over and over. Martin McDonagh’s filmmaking debut was 2008’s In Bruges, about two Irish hit men in Belgium, one of whom has secretly been tasked with killing the other because of a screw-up. Wild Horse Nine is quite similar, with two American hit men in Chile, one of whom wants the other to kill him because he’s terminally ill. I have to say that the movie that’s opening this week is quite the better one, in large part because John Malkovich gives possibly the greatest performance of his storied career.
Set in 1973, the film stars Sam Rockwell as Lee, a CIA agent who’s in Chile with his mentor and partner Chris (Malkovich). They’re down south to prepare the coup against Salvador Allende, but they’ve taken one last trip to Easter Island. The station chief (Steve Buscemi) has ordered a hit on Chris, who can’t stop telling Chileans that they’re spies, or telling his higher-ups that he’s planning to write a memoir that will spill the agency’s dirty secrets. On a related note, Chris has ordered a hit on himself because he’s dying of cancer, and he wants to see the famous Polynesian stone heads before he goes.
It took me two viewings to appreciate just how beautifully structured McDonagh’s script is, with all the callbacks to earlier parts of the film perfectly placed. If I didn’t notice it before, it’s because the movie’s whole shaggy vibe obscures it. McDonagh makes good use of the contrast between the island’s rolling hills (which are famously populated by herds of wild horses) and Santiago’s European-style architecture. In addition, his script is packed with his usual coruscating comic set pieces, such as Chris claiming he can tell which countries are gay from their cheese-making prowess: “England? Totally gay, and surprisingly good cheese … Russia? Not gay at all, and not one single good cheese.” Pure consternation results when Chris suddenly tells Lee that he never wanted to die on Easter Island and instead demands to go to Venice so he can be killed on a gondola and thrown into a canal.
The camaraderie between the two agents is well enacted by the lead actors, with Chris’ indiscreet ramblings both amusing and vastly irritating Lee, who’s been promoted to senior partner because Chris’ mind is going. Rockwell does some of his best work here, but it’s Malkovich who magnetizes your attention. He frequently drawls his words, because Chris is often high on morphine that he’s taking for the pain. While dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder, he wanders off into all manner of amusing tangents: “When I die, my cancer dies. Does cancer go to heaven? That’d be a shit heaven.” Yet his moments of lucidity are refreshingly sharp as well, like when Lee takes Chris to task for shooting at a car when he thinks he’s being spied on, and Chris responds, “What are we, hippies now?”
Both Chris and the movie go back and forth over whether John F. Kennedy was one of the 68 people that Lee says Chris has killed. Maybe the important thing for Wild Horse Nine is whether Chris believes that he did it. That (and his Catholic faith that prevents him from killing himself) is what gives gravity to his idle musing over whether any Nazi soldiers went to heaven. “Maybe some guy who threw himself on a grenade to protect someone’s mother,” Lee offers. “You’re 100 times better than that guy.”
In any event, Chris feels he has much to atone for, including being mean to Patrice Lumumba just before the Congolese president’s assassination. Thus, he kidnaps a left-wing student activist (Mariana di Girolamo) to save her life during the movie’s climactic shootout among the stone heads. His final advice to her to kill as many cops and soldiers as she can before they kill her is downright gloomy, but his earlier counsel to never let Pinochet’s death squads put her in a car winds up saving her. The movie’s tragic view of life and its comedy about two friends having one last hangout seem to coalesce in Malkovich’s performance, which takes in the individual man’s plentiful regrets, his devotion to the horses he meets, and his mordantly funny jokes as he ponders the abyss. The achievements in the filmmaking and the character are inseparable. The movie ends with Lee crying over his dead friend’s body, and despite everything, you may find yourself joining him.
Wild Horse Nine
Starring Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh. Rated R.
