After dates in Bruges, Los Angeles, Missouri and Inisherin, the Martin McDonagh world tour now lands at Easter Island. Against the backdrop of those giant stone heads (Moai), Wild Horse Nine mixes the one-liners and bursts of violence of In Bruges with the emotional wallop of The Banshees Of Inisherin, enriched by a bittersweet meditation on ageing that is new in McDonagh’s work. Perhaps best of all, it is vividly brought to life by electric performances from John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, both working at the peak of their considerable powers.
Some of McDonagh’s best work centres on the complexities of male friendship — usually between Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson — and Wild Horse Nine delves deeper into this fascination. Chris Carlisle (Malkovich) is a seasoned, ornery, increasingly forgetful CIA agent, who taught the Irish how to build bombs and has “killed people in countries you can’t spell”; he may have even supplied the rifle that killed JFK ten years earlier. His only friend (seemingly) is Lee Chesterfield (McDonagh regular Rockwell), a younger, less cynical, more together operative who 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, engineering a Pinochet-led military coup at the behest of the Nixon administration. Now it’s time for a break.
The twists and turns emerge out of character, but really the film’s strengths lie in the chemistry between the two leads.
On the orders of CIA chief MJ (Steve Buscemi, in his best role for years), Carlisle and Chesterfield are dispatched to Easter Island. The whys and wherefores of the sortie are best left to discover yourself but, as is McDonagh’s wont, it is less about subterfuge and spycraft and more just a terrifically entertaining hang-out movie. Carlisle and Chesterfield shooting the shit (rather than politicians) is a joy. We get killer convos about moths, the correlation between ‘gay’ countries (it’s very clear Chris and Lee are men out of time) and good cheese, a dwarf carrying a basketball and whether it’s better to date a junkie or an alcoholic. En route, they meet a pair of Chilean students (Mariana di Girólamo, Ailín Salas) who berate the oldies for not using the island’s proper name, Rapa Nui (“You shouldn’t know the word ‘indigenous’ at your age,” barks Carlisle). Carlisle also has spiritual encounters with a horse, the equine star giving a nuanced performance that makes Banshees Of Inisherin’s donkey look like a ham. Take a bow, animal wrangler Fabián Gabelli.
At 72, Carlisle is dictating his memoirs and this is the closest thing the story gets to an engine, as MJ looks to Chesterfield to discover the secrets the spook will spill (MJ doesn’t know the book opens with musings about whether there are dinosaurs in heaven). The twists and turns emerge out of character, but really the film’s strengths lie in the chemistry between the two leads. Ostensibly a funky straight man, Rockwell threads a needle between charismatic and exasperated, hinting at hidden reservoirs of feeling toward his pal — there are also a couple of priceless phone calls between Chesterfield and his brassy wife Marge (Parker Posey, excellent), who has cheated on Lee with both a banker and a clown. After years of more forgettable villain roles, Malkovich is on fire here, by turns laconic and irascible, putting his own imprint on McDonagh’s rich poetry — watch him wrap his mouth around “cahoots” — but also finding the soulfulness in Carlisle’s predicament.
For, as well as all the cool, colourful dialogue, it’s a deeply human film shot through with melancholy, regret, remorse and the difficulty in parsing mortality, the emotions beautifully underlined by Carter Burwell’s elegiac score. The music also points to another touchstone. With its wide-open spaces, fascination with horses and the sense of an ageing gunslinger coming to terms with his violent past, the film has Western vibes, a kind of Unforgiven with zingers. That Wild Horse Nine can knit all these disparate elements — Western, politics, black comedy, thriller, relationship study — into a seamless whole is a breathless act of juggling. If you want to nitpick, McDonagh’s imagery doesn’t lodge in the memory as much as his words. But when the furrow is this fruitful, who cares?