Wild Horse Nine Review - Malkovich, Rockwell, and McDonagh at His Peak
“Sometimes I think I care about the moths in Chile more than I care about the people in Chile.”
John Malkovich says this early in Wild Horse Nine, musing over an apartment infested with moths he refuses to kill. Instead, he explains, he has been escorting them outside. The line is funny, and it is also a confession from a man who has spent a career destabilizing governments and killing people, and who has begun to suspect that he got his priorities wrong. It tells you nearly everything about Martin McDonagh’s new film, and about why Malkovich’s performance in it is one of the best of his career.
McDonagh seems intent on proving he is at the peak of his powers. His last film, The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), was perhaps his best to date, and this one approaches those same heights. It also returns us to the themes of his first, In Bruges (2008), in which Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson played a pair of hitmen reflecting on their lives of violence and organized crime as they seek solace in the titular Belgian city. The pairing is different now, but the premise is familiar. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play Chris and Lee, a pair of CIA agents seeking solace on Rapa Nui in 1973, and in this case the criminal organization they work for is the United States government. Their job is to carry out assassinations and destabilize democratic governments around the world, and they know that socialist president Salvador Allende will soon be overthrown in a military coup. Before that happens, they are sent to Rapa Nui, and it is there, among the moai and the wild horses, that they take stock of what they have done with their lives.
Chris is the elder of the two, and he is dying. He has killed 68 people in his long career, and may or may not have had a hand in some grassy-knoll business in November 1963. He takes heroin because cancer is killing him. He falls asleep to Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He has long wanted to see “the big heads” of the island, and he plans to work on his long-delayed memoir while he is there. He wants the book to open with a surprise, so he decides it will begin with dinosaurs. “Did they have souls?” he wonders aloud.
Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, is the straight man of this comedic duo, constantly annoyed by his partner, yet attuned to him in the way of people who have worked together for years. They bicker constantly. But the film lets us see the affection under the annoyance, and Rockwell’s performance is generous in the best sense.
Malkovich is simply wonderful. Chris is nearing the end not only of his CIA career but of his life, and he has blown out his filter. Now he just blurts the truth. When one of the earnest young progressively-minded tourists speaks proudly of the power of organized protest, Chris tells her, “Marches are just the places we can get the clearest photos of you without your knowing.” It is the kind of performance that reminds you why we go to the movies: to watch actors at play, even as they work.
What the movie understands, finally, is that a man who has spent his life doing terrible things may still contain tenderness, and that the tenderness does not cancel the terrible things. Chris cares about the moths, and about Lee, and about a horse on a faraway island, and he has killed 68 people. McDonagh holds these facts together without resolving them, which is why the picture is funny and sad at once. It is a film about two men facing the end with jokes and a kind of friendship, in front of statues that have outlasted everyone who carved them.
I would not be surprised if Wild Horse Nine holds up as one of the best films of the year. It certainly contains one of the best performances. Malkovich has been doing wonderful work for decades, but here he gives us a character so funny, so wounded, and so unexpectedly kind that I almost forgot the actor altogether.