by Nataliia Serebriakova
Cast:
John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, Parkey Posey, Tom Waits
Intro:
... much more than a spy film ... tragicomic story about aging, guilt, friendship and the impossible attempt to negotiate with one’s own past.
At the Venice Film Festival, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine premiered in competition. The new film by the Irish director, known for In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, is instantly recognisable through his dialogue. His characters can talk endlessly about friendship, death, politics or complete nonsense, yet beneath the verbal sparring there is almost always something much darker and more serious. He likes to mix absurdity with tragedy, laughter with violence, and everyday arguments with questions of guilt, loneliness and mortality.
This time, however, he takes his characters somewhere unexpected: Chile in 1973, on the eve of Augusto Pinochet’s military coup, with much of the story unfolding on Easter Island. Santiago is in the grip of a political crisis surrounding Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. Two American CIA operatives, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), are sent to the island, while their superior MJ (Steve Buscemi) remains on the mainland.
At first, it seems like McDonagh is returning to familiar territory: two men forced to spend a long time together in an unfamiliar place. They argue, trade sarcastic remarks, irritate each other and gradually reveal their deepest fears. The setup inevitably recalls In Bruges, but here, the personal drama is overshadowed by a much larger historical catastrophe.
Chris is a veteran intelligence officer who has spent decades participating in operations that helped change governments and political regimes. Now he is dying of cancer and knows that his time is running out. On the island, he begins recording his memories for a possible memoir. For the CIA, this is a serious problem: a man who has spent his life operating under a strict code of secrecy has suddenly decided that he wants to talk.
Yet Chris does not produce a conventional spy memoir. His thoughts jump from political conspiracies to dinosaurs, from his own past to reflections on death. Under the influence of morphine, illness and approaching mortality, his monologues acquire an almost surreal freedom. It becomes difficult to tell where the confused memory of a dying man ends and where the intelligence operative who has finally decided to stop being silent begins. That contradiction lies at the heart of the film. Chris spent his life serving a machine that interfered in the destinies of entire countries in the name of national interest. Now the same machine is prepared to discard him. He has become inconvenient not only because he is dying, but because he knows too much.
This is where the title acquires an additional meaning. There really are wild horses on the island, but Chris himself gradually becomes “wild” — a man who, after decades of following orders, no longer wants to obey the rules.
There is literally no country for old men here. Of course, Wild Horse Nine has little in common thematically with the Coen brothers’ film, but the phrase unexpectedly fits McDonagh’s story. The system to which these men devoted their lives no longer needs its veterans. They have become obsolete — especially when they know too many secrets.
McDonagh makes the idea even more ironic by assembling an extraordinary cast of “cool old men”: John Malkovich, Tom Waits and Steve Buscemi, all playing people who have outlived their own era and suddenly discovered that they are no longer needed.
McDonagh does not try to absolve his protagonist. Illness does not erase his guilt, and approaching death does not make his past crimes less real. What interests the director is what remains when all external justifications disappear. What is left of a professional mask when there is nothing ahead but death?
In that sense, Wild Horse Nine is much more than a spy film. It is a tragicomic story about aging, guilt, friendship and the impossible attempt to negotiate with one’s own past.
