Wild Horse Nine
Director: Martin McDonagh
Cert: 15A
Starring: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Mariana Di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins
If you wished to drag Martin McDonagh down you could argue that, with his latest acidic comedy, he is returning to a much overworked trope: the quarrelling hitmen (or hoodlums or spooks). When In Bruges, McDonagh’s first feature, sent Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson about the Flemish canals, they were working through moves already much enjoyed by Quentin Tarantino.
No matter. The film-maker has discovered a host of diverting variations on those familiar melodies.
Wild Horse Nine transports us back to the golden era for conspiracy-theory movies – and actual conspiracies – as two CIA operatives, played by a fragile John Malkovich and an exasperated Sam Rockwell, are dispatched from their posting in Santiago to remote Easter Island.
It is 1973, and Salvadore Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, is about to be deposed in a coup that will have the agency’s fingerprints all over it.
Early on we figure out that Chris Carlisle, given whispering mischievousness by Malkovich, is not long for this wretched world. He has long lived with death. Indeed, he has sent more than a few to the boneyard. “Guatemala: successful. Congo: successful. Bay of Pigs: less successful,” Carlisle mutters of past operations.
But a more insidious arrangement with eternity is now afoot: having lived out the six months the doctors gave him, Chris fancies hurrying on the process. Maybe his partner could do him in and thereby save him the sin of suicide (though surely the Almighty would see through the technicality).
Rockwell’s Lee Chesterfield finds himself in the role of harried straight man. He has a lot to handle. Carlisle, perhaps in the early stages of dementia, is not only now blabbing confessions to every passing stranger but also threatening to tell all in a memoir. Seething in Santiago, the pair’s boss – Steve Buscemi at his economic best – knows all and needs Lee to take control.
Meanwhile, our heroes have bumped into a pair of left-wing students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) who, thanks to the chatty senior spook, are discovering unhappy truths about their political prospects.
You would expect lengthy dialogue riffing from McDonagh in this mode. Much of what we get is sharp and subversive; a fair bit of it leans towards indulgence. What you make of Carlisle’s thesis that the world’s gayest nations produce the best cheese will depend on your tolerance for life in a post-Tarantino universe. At such times, the distance between Wild Horse Nine and the Beckettian shapes of The Banshees of Inisherin could not be clearer.
The film assumes the audience will already expect the worst of the American intelligence services, not least in lengthy diversions that rest on a progressive orthodoxy that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating John F Kennedy. The newly forthright Carlisle has chilling (and entirely plausible) advice for their two young friends about dealing with the security mob. “Never get into a car with them,” is the most grimly prescient nugget.
What is Wild Horse Nine asking us to make of Malkovich’s failing Mephistopheles? He never exactly becomes a hero. But, thanks in no small part to a masterfully brittle performance, we certainly come to sympathise with his existential plight and understand his grim fatalism.
Carlisle may be a force for oppression, but he asks nobody to forgive or to excuse. He acts, for us, as a human prism that separates the wavelengths in the cold-war beam: smarter than the hoodlums who bugged for Nixon, more realistic than many who protested the era’s outrages. “Marches are just the places we can get the clearest photos of you without your knowing,” he tells the students.
Comedy with a shiver to it.
In cinemas from Wednesday, November 4th
Source: The Irish Times · Donald Clarke
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- World
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- EN
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