If you’re familiar with the work of English filmmaker Martin McDonagh, you know that he is obsessed with a quest for truth, not just about the demands of relationships but about the meaning behind our thoughts … and actions.
In his 2008 film In Bruges, a pair of hitmen try to navigate the consequences of a failed contract. In 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a grieving mother and a disgruntled police officer team up to find whoever murdered the woman’s daughter. And in 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a falling out between two friends leads to a series of violent encounters.
Now we have Wild Horse Nine, a film that stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as, respectively, Central Intelligence Agency operatives Chris and Lee. The setting is Chile and the time frame is the summer of 1973, shortly before the infamous coup d’etat that would result in the death of the country’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende.
Chris and Lee, we learn, have worked to help the coup come about. But when the film opens, the two are dispatched by their CIA handler MJ (played by Steve Buscemi) to Rapa Nui, which – we are told more than once – is the indigenous name of the Chilean island popularly known as Easter Island.
From the start, we see how connected the two agents are. They’re like a veteran comedy routine, or longtime married couple, able to read each other’s emotions to the point that, even if they can’t finish each other’s sentences they at least can respond in ways that feel long-practiced.
And Malkovich’s Chris, the elder of the two, has a lot of feelings to process. He’s arrived at this time of life, one that has seen him assassinate some 68 people in his career, filled with something akin to regret. As he explains to Rockwell’s Lee, he’s reluctant to kill the moths in his room. But he worries about what will happen after he “escorts” – his word – them out into the rain.
In addition, Chris is open about who he is and unapologetic about revealing the truth about things as he sees it. He’s just as willing to talk out loud on an airplane about the revolutions he’s been involved in over the decades as he is to share with a pair of young Chilean women that their country is about to get … well, insert your favorite F-bomb profanity here.
For his part, Lee is at turns both patient and annoyed with all this. It’s not easy trying to keep his friend and partner under control, especially when both are being monitored by a worried MJ and Lee himself is fielding phone calls from his progressively worried wife (played by Parker Posey).
Nothing, though, stops the two from exploring the island, which is famously populated by the stone carvings that Chris repeatedly refers to as the “Big Heads.” Not the car that follows Chris one night (and which he shoots at), not the regular doses of morphine that Chris injects himself with, not the news that a concerned MJ is flying out to meet them – not even the single wild horse that Chris keeps encountering as if it’s trying to tell him something.
Eventually, the loose ends of McDonagh’s plot come together in a way that feels both natural and sad at once. And the film overall is funny throughout as well, though perhaps in moments just a bit conveniently so.
In any event, give McDonagh credit for casting well. Rockwell gives a master class in how to respond to situations that his character has trouble coping with. And Malkovich, finally given a chance to carry a film, performs the role of a lifetime. His Chris is the project’s heart and soul, a man looking back and feeling the weight of all that he has done and pondering, far too late, questions of what is right and what is wrong.
A born and bred Englishman, McDonagh also deserves points for finding a way to blend humor and drama into a story that outlines the CIA’s sordid history: not just in Chile, but in Guatemala, the Congo, Cuba and maybe even – pay attention, conspiracy theorists – Dallas in 1963.
Wild Horse Nine, then, becomes a seminar in how well a movie can make us laugh even as it invites us to take a good look at the truth of what, despite all our mythology, we Americans are – and are not.