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. Congo, 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.
Also tangled in proceedings are M.J. (Steve Buscemi), the men’s eminently disagreeable handler, who’s jittery about Chris’ increasingly loose lips on the job; Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo), a left-wing Chilean student also touring the island with her surly friend Alicia (Ailín Salas); and, back in the States, Lee’s wife Marge (Parker Posey, giving maximum Parker Posey), a kaftan-clad floozy who regales him by phone with updates on her extramarital exploits. (“Who cares?” she drawls, when he asks after the kids.) Women get markedly short shrift here, but then “Wild Horse Nine” is embedded in a patriarchal culture enjoying its last gasp in the tobacco-stained Seventies. Chris, for his part, is an unapologetic dinosaur, mocking Monica for her political correctness and women’s rights marches, but then, in his twilight days, he’s happy to concede the world is passing him by.
Perhaps McDonagh is too, to some degree. In its weakest scenes, his script strains for the kind of edgelord provocation sometimes associated with his writing, couched as the words of stubborn white men from another era: Chris riffs in poor taste on slain Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, and vents against indigenous renaming in a screed that almost angles for applause. But the film’s poignancy lies in its recognition that its ostensible heroes are on the way out, either eventually or very imminently in Chris’ case, and that the future rarely belongs to those who currently enjoy the most power. (Chris gets a later, far better barnstormer of a speech in which he advocates for independent thought and fascist resistance, albeit none too optimistically: “You’ll still die, but at least you’ll die with the wind in your hair,” he says wistfully.)
“Wild Horse Nine” is, like “The Banshees of Inisherin,” an open-ended political allegory, gesturing mordantly at a general, cyclical way of the world, but shrugging as to a solution. The pleasures of McDonagh’s writing and filmmaking have always been jaded, slightly downhearted ones, and that very much applies here, from the snarling brute poetry of his words to the more sighing, elegiac way that Malkovich delivers them, to the lovely, lackadaisical style of conversational drift that he and Rockwell share throughout.
The new film never quite surprises, either on its own terms or relative to its predecessors: Its ironies and reversals lock together more or less as you expect, and notwithstanding the sweeping, sunset-filtered beauty of Easter Island itself, McDonagh’s cinematic style remains prosaic. But there’s a necessary grain of discomfort in the film’s cool, jokey complacency, as it raises a glass to a generation of men that once ran the world — without remotely suggesting that they’re missed. %!s()
