Director Martin McDonagh is unconcerned with the subterfuge and spy craft, more in just bringing to light a terrifically entertaining hang-out movie. Our heroes Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) shoot the shit in a manner thats a joy. We guffaw at chats about moths, the correlation between ‘gay’ countries and good cheese, a dwarf carrying a basketball and whether its better to date a junkie or an alcoholic.
Its 1973, after the pair of CIA ops duo disrupt democracy in Chile, they are dispatched to Easter Island, against a backdrop of those giant stones, called Moai, mixing one-liners with bursts of violence and perhaps a bittersweet meditation on aging by both these actors at the peak of their considerable powers. Wild Horse Nine delves into the complexities of male friendship. Chris Carlisle is a seasoned, ornery bloke, increasingly forgetful CIA agent who ‘taught the Irish how to build bombs’ and has ‘killed people in countries you cant spell’, even maybe supplying the rifle that killed JFK ten years earlier. His only chum, Lee Chesterfield, a younger, less cynical, more together operative, can kill a man while eating a cheeseburger. The pair have been stationed in Chile for a year, working covertly to destabilise the newly elected Socialist prime minister, Salvador Allende, while engineering a Pinochet-led military coup at the behest of the Nixon administration.
They meet a pair of Chilean students at the airport who berate them for not using the Island’s proper name, Rapa Nui, to which Malkovich’s character questions how at their tender years they use words like ‘Indigenous’. Carlisle has spiritual encounters with a horse, the equine giving a nuanced performance. At 72, Carlisle is dictating his memoirs with twists and turns emerging between the two, taking the chemistry between them to a high level. Ostensibly a funky straight man, Rockwell threads a needle between charismatic and exasperated, hinting at hidden repressed feelings towards his mate. There’s a couple of priceless phone calls between Chesterfield and his brassy wife Marge (Parker Posey) who has cheated on him with a banker and a clown.
Malkovich is on fire here, turning laconic one minute and irascible the next. With all the cool, colourful dialogue, its a deeply human film shot with melancholy, regret, remorse and the difficulty in parsing mortality. The emotions on board are beautifully outlined in Carter Burwell’s elegiac score as the film threads a all the disparate elements, its wide-open spaces, fascination with horses and a sense of an ageing gunslinger coming to terms with his violent past, seamlessly juggling Western politics, black comedy, a thriller and relationship study. The movie doesn’t stray too far from Martin McDonagh’s base making the movie uproariously funny and moving, the duo make a double act for the ages. True to the director’s style the movie balances sharp, scabrous wit absurd banter that carry a lingering tragedy and melancholic notes.
The spanner in the plot is that Chris is dying and the higher-ups are afraid of what he might spill in his memoirs. I found this movie deliciously profane, an acridly funny hangout-comedy with periodic bursts of violence that included one of the funniest Manson Family jokes I’ve heard in years. The two leads are brilliant together, as is Steve Buscemi, Tom Waites and Mariana di Girolamo as the movie excoriates US imperialism in a strong indictment. If Malkovich doesn’t score an Oscar, a well over-deserved one, I’ll eat my proverbial hat.
