The British-Irish playwright and director Martin McDonagh is interested in the contours of male friendship. Specifically, he’s interested in men who are thrust together, whether they like it or not. In In Bruges, it was two hitmen on the lam. In The Banshees of Inisherin, it was two men who became friends by default—the island they lived on was so insular and small they had few other options.
Now, with Wild Horse Nine, he gives us two colleagues from the CIA—Chris (John Malkovich), on the verge of retirement, and the much younger Lee (Sam Rockwell), who may at one point have been a protegee but is now his supervisor.
Do they like each other?
It’s hard to like Chris (it’s also hard to not like Chris, if that makes any sense), as old age has given him what doctors might diagnose as diarrhea of the mouth. One suspects that Chris was always garrulous—too garrulous for a CIA agent. But now that’s he (slightly) losing his faculties and has a fatalistic approach to his life and work, the man literally won’t shut up.
It’s 1973 and Chris and Lee have just left Santiago, Chile and are on their way to Easter Island. (Chris had been yammering on about seeing the big heads.)
Lee is frustrated with his older colleague—especially when he casually tells two pretty Chilean students that they’re CIA agents in town to destabilize the Chilean democracy—but he’s patient, too.
We soon find out that Chris is dying of cancer and that seeing Easter Island is his final wish (well, one of them). They’re not on a job; Lee is accompanying him out of love.
Or is he? Chris has two notes tucked into his jacket pocket. One reads: “Remember You’re Dying.” The other says, “Don’t Trust Lee.”
Everything we’ve seen of Lee shows him to be loyal to the old man. But could something else be up his sleeve?
His department in the CIA, led by the irritable MJ (Steve Buscemi), is positively freaking out that Chris is planning on writing his memoirs, especially since he was directly involved the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. (The film takes it on faith that the CIA killed JFK and who am I to argue?) MJ wants Lee to retrieve the tapes that Chris has been dictating his memoir into and also confiscate the gun that was possibly used for the hit. Is Lee just pretending to be a friend?
McDonagh wrote Wild Horse Nine with Malkovich in mind for the lead and it feels like a valentine to the singular actor. It’s hard to explain what a phenomenon Malkovich was back in the ’90s—a serious actor, an unlikely sex symbol, a fascinating weirdo. (Indeed, the whole film is studded with Gex X icons: not just Buscemi but Parker Posey as Lee’s casually unfaithful wife and Tom Waits as Chris’ off-the-grid brother.) I still maintain that Malkovich’s Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons is the best I’ve ever seen—just consider the many ways he repeats “It is beyond my control” to a devasted Michelle Pfeiffer. And of course, his iconic status was cemented by Being John Malkovich, a brilliant work of meta wizardry by Spike Jonze.
He still looks cool in the way Bill Murray will always look cool (Murray is the only other actor I can imagine pulling off this part)—his hair wispy now, the bags under his eyes, always a bit prominent, now deeper. He still has the slightest lisp. Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh dresses him sharply, in straw porkpie hats, suspenders, and patterned shirts. (Lee favors giant belt buckles and cowboy hats.)
Malkovich is extremely funny and touching in this role—with McDonagh’s profane, clever, seemingly off-the-cuff dialogue pairing well with his mirthful, off-kilter delivery. His Chris is a jokester, a raconteur, and a gleeful asshole, but he’s also having a crisis of conscience. He worries about whether or not he’ll go to heaven. He’s killed people. Lots of them. So now he saves the moths that he finds in his closet, gently ushering them outside. He finds solace in the wild horses that roam Easter Island. (He’s less impressed with the Moai, or big heads. They all look the same to him.)
Wild Horse Nine is yet another installment of McDonagh’s “Men Bickering in Beautiful Settings” series. The film looks stunning, the wisecracks are razor sharp, the violence comes in unexpected bursts, and as always, there is much beauty and depth behind the banter.