Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice
WILD HORSE NINE © Searchlight
Two days into Venice, and the new Martin McDonagh movie already seems close to ending the competition for the Golden Lion. There are more than a few dark horses and wild cards waiting over the next ten days of the festival, but the enthusiastic applause at the end of the press screening and John Malkovich's immediate entrance into the Oscar conversation as a leading actor should give everyone a clear idea of just how strong and convincing the film is. Believe the hype: this is a very solid movie about male friendship (no surprise here) that really does not shy away from the political.
McDonagh will not be the last filmmaker arriving here at the Lido with a movie that is quintessentially his creature, "just" another version of his usual work. Nevetheless this one is written and directed with such control and cocksureness, that the result is impressive in its formal perfection...
McDonagh's latest is even more so when you remember that it feels like a great movie directed by a veteran (and in a way it is ) and yet it is only the fifth feature-length film of McDonagh's directing career. Once again, he starts from an original screenplay and finds his strength in that written core, with no loose threads and no stones left unturned: everything here has a function and a reason to be, even beyond the good laughs this black, hyper-cynical comedy steals from you.
Wild Horse Nine is the crepuscular story of a vacation taken by two CIA agents stationed in Santiago, Chile, in 1973. Allende is the recently elected president of the country, the first Marxist democratically elected to the presidency in the world. The CIA does not like the choice made by the Chilean people, and Lee (Sam Rockwell) and Chris (John Malkovich) are there to do what they always do: destabilize a young democracy a little too much in love with freedom and progress, supporting the military side of the establishment in order to engineer a coup that will install a government more to Washington's liking.
WILD HORSE NINE © Searchlight
Politics, at least at the beginning, is just the background of the story: Lee and Chris are about to fly to Easter Island to see the "giant heads," the Moai. Chris, however, is so unhinged that Lee essentially has to keep an eye on him, as he casually reveals secret CIA plans for a September coup to two left-wing students they meet at the airport. Chris is very old, very unwell and looking back at what he has done with his life. Rumor has it he was the one who shot JFK, actually. For a man who is losing his memory and is constantly capricious and contradictory, he has moments of extraordinary lucidity, as when he wonders why he is incapable of killing the moths infesting his furniture, apparently caring more about butterflies than actual Chilean people. Several people, for several reasons, have asked Lee to kill him, particularly now that Chris plans to write a memoir about his life and what happened in Dallas.
So Lee is divided between loyalty to his mentor and friend, his growing annoyance at Chris's behavior and the realization that, once he is gone, nobody will ever see Lee the way his friend does. Notice, for example, how cold Lee actually is too, not even stopping eating his burger while killing a man. Through increasingly absurd confrontations between the two, the movie drips one emotional revelation after another into this working relationship founded on killing and secrets, yet so deeply rooted that even Lee's wife (a wonderfully neurotic and abrasive Parker Posey) softens only when her husband tells her how badly his colleague is doing.
McDonagh's new bromance, full of tension and betrayal, is the emotional core of the movie, a sort of The Banshees of Inisherin that hasn't gone wrong yet. If you don't count realizing you're about to lose your best friend when you see his shit-stained underwear hanging out to dry. That would be more than enough for a very strong black comedy, with a beautiful setting and a striking metaphorical use of oranges, yellows and reds across its '70s patterned clothes. But McDonagh has even more in mind, in a movie that becomes a frontal attack on the CIA, with some explosive, controversial ideas about the very function of the military, the police and similar institutions.
Towards the end of the movie, Chris tells a young Chilean girl that there is no way to stop what is coming. There are only two options: leave the country, or kill every person in a military uniform, every policeman, even every kid who dreams of becoming one. The movie strongly suggests that the ultimate purpose of the police and the military is not to protect people, but to make it possible to overturn democracy when voters happen to choose the "wrong" candidate. Flee, fight as a terrorist, or avoid electing the liberal, progressive candidate in the first place.
If this all sounds bleak and cynical, it is. It is also the endpoint of decades of movies about the ifs, the hows, the suspicions and the evidence surrounding American interference whenever local politics did not suit the White House. The real change here is that there are no ifs, no conditionals, no suspicions: McDonagh points his finger directly at the CIA in a formidable attack on its methods and strategies, then underlines that the United States itself was the first victim of the same logic, because the antibodies of military power are present there too.
The proof, strangely enough, is the shitty cheese America produces and exports: only "very gay nations," with strong democratic governments, apparently have the strength to be free, gay and capable of producing very good cheese. America does not, because it has turned those same methods against itself. JFK was the "wrong" choice, the one who was too liberal, and so he ended up on the very long list of people Chris intends to put in his biography. The connection between aggressor and victim, between a United States that has already experienced on a smaller scale, the same violence it is now preparing to inflict on Chile, is what makes Wild Horse Nine so powerful. It also makes crystal clear why Pablo Larraín, who has built an entire career around past and present consequences of US support for Pinochet and the dictatorship, is among the producers of this movie.
Chris hopes to end up in heaven because, yes, he killed people, but he also saved moths, and at least he's better than your average Nazi. In trying to save him, Lee ultimately makes it unavoidable that he will have to grant his friend's last wish, a particularly cruel one. There is little hope for Chris, none for the horse that reassured him about his own mortality, and next to none for Lee. McDonagh leaves precious little for America either. Chris, who once looked through a viewfinder and killed what America liked to think of as its hope, is convinced that the country was not ruined that day in Dallas. It had been a "shitty nation" to its core long before that. Dallas merely made the rot impossible to ignore for people like his friend Lee. Martin McDonagh seems to share his pessimistic stance, but never loses his usual dark humor in revealing it.