Review: Wild Horse Nine

Martin McDonagh has always been fascinated by men who would rather start a war than admit they are lonely. Wild Horse Nine gives him two accomplished specimens: CIA officers Chris and Lee, killers whose friendship has survived covert operations, upheaval and the impossibility of either man saying something sincere without wrapping it in an insult.

It is 1973, and the pair have helped prepare the ground for the coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lee (Sam Rockwell) treats the assignment with the professionalism of someone who stopped asking moral questions long ago. Chris (John Malkovich), older and dying of cancer, has begun doing the opposite. He records rambling recollections, divulges classified information to strangers and announces his intention to visit Rapa Nui before death catches up with him. Lee agrees to accompany him, out of loyalty and because leaving Chris unsupervised qualifies as a national security threat.

This suggests a paranoid espionage thriller. McDonagh uses it as the framework for a mordant road movie about friendship, guilt and the stories powerful men tell themselves when history begins keeping receipts. Chris and Lee are not decent people trapped inside a corrupt institution. They are active participants in its cruelty, and the film’s choice is refusing to make their charm an alibi. Their jokes are funny; the consequences waiting behind them are not.

Malkovich understands that contradiction magnificently. Chris is theatrical, vain, frighteningly casual about violence and suddenly attentive to the smallest living things. He worries about moths while discussing dead presidents. He speaks as though every idle observation deserves preservation for future scholars, yet Malkovich lets uncertainty leak through the performance in pauses and sidelong glances. Chris has spent a lifetime turning evasion into an art form. Faced with death, he is discovering that eloquence and honesty are not the same thing.

Rockwell has the less flamboyant role, which makes his work easy to underestimate. Lee is the audience for Chris’s routines, but he is never merely the straight man. His exasperation carries affection, resentment and fear, often in the same look. Rockwell is especially good when Lee’s professional instincts collide with the dawning suspicion that his closest friend may also be his final assignment. Their chemistry gives the film its pulse. Even when the screenplay wanders, watching these two men irritate each other remains a pleasure.

Steve Buscemi brings frayed authority to MJ, their nervous superior, while Parker Posey turns Lee’s telephone calls home into small eruptions of comic hostility. Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas, as Chilean students Monica and Alicia, provide more than plot complication. Their presence punctures the agents’ ability to regard Chile as an abstraction, although the film treats the women more as moral pressure points than fully dimensional characters.

That imbalance points toward the movie’s limitation. McDonagh wants to examine American intervention, masculine loyalty, mortality, Catholic guilt and the possibility of redemption, while maintaining the loose pleasures of two terrific actors trading exquisitely rude dialogue. The mixture is often exhilarating, but not always seamless. At times, Chile’s political catastrophe risks becoming an unusually grave backdrop for the spiritual crisis of two Americans who helped cause it. The film recognizes this problem without entirely escaping it.

Still, Wild Horse Nine is most persuasive when it resists speeches and allows the Rapa Nui landscape to dwarf the men crossing it. The island’s monumental faces suggest history stripped of excuses: silent witnesses before whom Chris’s cultivated mythology begins to look small. McDonagh’s humor grows quieter there, and the movie’s melancholy deepens without curdling into sentimentality.

This is familiar territory for the filmmaker; damaged men, barbed affection, violence arriving before emotional comprehension, but familiarity is not the same as exhaustion. Wild Horse Nine may not reinvent McDonagh’s obsessions, yet it refines them into something funny, uneasy and unexpectedly tender. Above all, it gives Malkovich a role worthy of his particular gifts: the intelligence, the menace, the absurdity and the faint tremor of sadness beneath them all.

Chris spends the film trying to decide what confession is worth when absolution may be impossible. Wild Horse Nine offers no easy answer. It does, however, understand that remorse arriving late is still remorse, even if history has every right to refuse the apology.

4/5