Location has always been especially significant in the work of the British-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. Several of his plays, like The Lieutenant of Inishmore, are named for their Irish coastal settings. But he's also ventured further abroad, especially in his movies. He traveled to Belgium for In Bruges and to the American Midwest for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Most of his new film, Wild Horse Nine, takes place on Easter Island, which, being more than 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, is one of the most remote places on Earth. Wherever it takes place, though, a McDonagh movie is still a McDonagh movie, spiked with oddball twists, jolts of violence, and profanities galore. Cut out all the expletives and it might run barely an hour.
It begins in 1973, in Santiago. John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, a CIA operative who's been doing America's foreign policy dirty work for years, toppling democratically elected leaders everywhere from Guatemala to Congo. He's about to do it again in Chile; the military coup that will overthrow President Salvador Allende and install Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship is months away.
In one scene, Chris and his younger partner, Lee Chesterfield — played by Sam Rockwell — are waiting for a flight to Easter Island, where they're headed for a week's vacation. While talking with two Chilean college students, Chris lets slip what's about to happen, telling them, "We came down here to destabilize your democracy, and it is going great."
Chris isn't usually this reckless. But he has terminal cancer and early-onset dementia, both of which, along with a steady drip of morphine, have loosened his tongue. Malkovich's performance craftily confuses our sense of Chris' mental state: Are his lapses real, or are they part of some long con? That question becomes even more pressing when Chris announces that he plans to die on Easter Island, and he wants Lee to handle it — a quick, painless death, administered by a professional and a trusted friend.
Lee loves Chris and is unwilling to go along with the plan. Meanwhile, the CIA's South American bureau chief, played by an even-more-dyspeptic-than-usual Steve Buscemi, is monitoring them closely and knows that Chris is becoming a liability. Lee also has to deal with occasional hectoring phone calls from his boozy, openly unfaithful wife, played by a more frantic-than-funny Parker Posey.
That's mostly it for the plot. Perhaps taking his cue from Easter Island's vast, open spaces, and from the wild horses that roam the landscape, McDonagh has tried to shape the movie in the spirit of a comic Western. The dialogue feels slower and more drawn-out than usual, without his signature staccato rhythms. Nobody severs their own fingers, like in The Banshees of Inisherin; there's little real action until the final act. I'm usually on board with a restrained, less-is-more approach, but the material here is lazily third-rate.
For much of the movie, we're watching Chris and Lee do a tiresome bantering-and-bickering routine as they explore Easter Island. Although, as one of those college students points out, they should really call the place by its Indigenous name, Rapa Nui. That correction provokes scornful, reactionary laughter from Chris, who's spent his career overthrowing global democracies with little concern for the people living in those democracies, Indigenous or otherwise. This isn't the first time McDonagh has used his characters to mock people's sensitivities about language, which might suggest that he's more than a little sensitive about language himself.
Wild Horse Nine can be smug, but also sentimental. The movie desperately wants us to like and even love Chris, which is why, I think, it gives the character a cancer diagnosis and many opportunities for guilty soul-searching in between punchlines. Despite Malkovich's skillful performance, I never really bought the character for a second. Even within a fictional context, it's strange that we're being asked to shed tears for one of the covert architects of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Some might give Wild Horse Nine credit for daring, within a comedy format, to address the consequences of America's military intervention in the first place. But daring isn't enough. Despite his geopolitically savvy pose, McDonagh's perspective here is closer to that of an irreverent tourist, wisecracking his way through history's graveyard.
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