On Screen: “Wild Horse Nine”
Wild Horse Nine
John Malkovich will inevitably snag a Best Actor nomination, along with Supporting Sam Rockwell, for Anglo-Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonough’s “Wild Horse Nine” — which is really a performance piece.
Like McDonough’s “In Bruge” (2008), the plot follows two hit-men on holiday. Like his “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), these aggressive characters are sympathetic. And like “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), geopolitical upheaval is viewed from a remote island setting.
World-weary CIA assassins Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and his protégé Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) are traveling to Easter Island for a week just before the 1973 CIA-backed coup d’état against Chile’s democratically elected Marxist leader, Salvador Allende, leads to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
While garrulous Chris, who is addicted to morphine for terminal cancer, babbles on about how he may or may not have been involved in JFK’s assassination in Dallas, exasperated Lee is coping with an adulterous, alcoholic wife (Parker Posey).
At the Santiago airport, they exchange flirtatious banter with two young women — Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailin Salas) — who tell them the indigenous name for Easter Island is Rapa Nui, only to be rebuked by caustic Chris who snaps, “You shouldn’t even know the word ‘indigenous’ at your age.”
Chris is determined to see ‘the giant heads’ before he dies and doesn’t care if their aboriginal name is Moai. So, amid flashes of unresolved guilt and regret, cinematographer Ben Davis captures picturesque scenes with the sentinel-like statues and a herd of wild horses, set to Carter Burwell’s elegiac score.
Accompanied by excessive profanity, Chris recites several memorable monologues: explaining why ‘the gay countries’ (France, Holland, England) make the finest cheeses and how the Molotov cocktail was invented.
Having lost all sense of discretion due to the onset of dementia, Chris is recording a tell-all memoir, glibly spilling state secrets — like how he helped destabilize the governments of Congo, Guatemala and Indonesia — much to the consternation of his cranky bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), who considers him as a security risk and wants him silenced. That task falls to Lee. And so it goes.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Wild Horse Nine” is a sinister, sardonic 7, playing in theaters.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.