By Jason Osiason
Nobody lets great character actors feast like Martin McDonagh, and Wild Horse Nine feels like his grand salute to them. It’s smaller in scale than his last two, with no Oscar-sized grief and no island full of symbolism, just two old spies and a boss and a few rooms and a long drive, and it’s deeply sweet and funny as hell, a buddy movie smuggled inside a political thriller.
It’s Chile in 1973, a few days before the coup the Americans are about to help along, and two CIA men get sent from Santiago out to Easter Island to wait something out. Chris, played by John Malkovich, is the older one, the one who has been doing this work since before the younger one was born, and Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, is the partner, and Rockwell does the thing he does for McDonagh where he plays a guy who thinks he’s the smart one in the room right up until the moment he finds out he isn’t. Their station chief, MJ, played by Steve Buscemi, sends them off with instructions that make less sense the longer you think about them, which is the point, and then the movie just lets these three talk, because that’s the whole engine. McDonagh writes dialogue the way other people write music, and he hands the sheet to three guys who can sight-read anything.
Watching it this month the timing is eerie, because this is a movie about Americans quietly rearranging another country’s government in the name of stability, and it’s landing in theaters while Venezuela is on every front page. McDonagh couldn’t have planned it and I’m not sure he’d want the credit, but it sits under every scene and makes the jokes land a little harder than they’re supposed to.
Malkovich is tremendous as Chris, a dying CIA assassin who spent a lifetime bending history with his own hands and is now watching it move on without him, forgetting things, repeating himself, no longer sure which wars he started and which ones he only heard about. Malkovich plays him without a drop of self-pity, as a man who did terrible things with total conviction and is now mostly annoyed that nobody needs him to do any more of them. There’s a particular sadness in that, a career killer aging into irrelevance, and Malkovich finds it funny and awful at the same time, which is the McDonagh sweet spot and he has never been more at home in it. He won Venice for this and he should keep winning.
Buscemi, meanwhile, is playing their boss, a man on more drugs than anyone in a position of authority should be on, and he spends most of the movie as a jittery problem on the other end of a phone line until the end, when he gets one enormous belly laugh, the biggest laugh I had at the whole festival, and it honestly could carry him to a nomination too. I’m not going to say what it is, but you’ll know it when the entire theater goes at once.
It’s a small movie about a big ugly moment and it has more affection in it than anything McDonagh has made, because he loves these actors, and he built them a room and let them eat. [B+]
