‘Wild Horse Nine’ Is Full of Hysterical but Horrible Remorse

Filmmaker Martin McDonagh, British bard of acerbic misanthropy, has conjured his most inspired character yet: a loose-lipped secret agent. “I was killing people before you were born,” 72-year-old CIA vet Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) loudly announces while flying coach in a plane full of oblivious civilians. “I’ve killed people in countries you can’t even spell.”

Moral rot has never been as thrillingly outrageous as in Wild Horse Nine, a portrait of two Cold War government killers in 1973 struggling with the consequences of their clandestine power plays. Chris is a zero-fucks-given lifer, the man behind a greatest-hits list of clandestine hits. Best friend and fellow spy Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) bears the brunt of his pal’s blunt outbursts with exasperated eyerolls, smiling sheepishly at onlookers with tsk-tsk public denials while chastising his friend through gritted teeth.

Wild Horse Nine   ★★★★★  (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Martin McDonagh
Written by: Martin McDonagh
Starring: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Running time: 117 mins

Just as jaded but less publicly vocal, Lee’s an equally foul-mouthed company man who toes the cloak-and-dagger line for superiors like pencil-pushing Bureau Chief M.J. (Steve Buscemi). They’ve all been in Santiago, Chile, for the past year engineering the overthrow of president Salvador Allende, a democratically elected Marxist that the U.S. cannot abide in an era of Red-Scare diplomacy. And, only a few months before General Augusto Pinochet’s violent September 11 military coup, Chris and Lee take a weeklong vacation to sightsee the ancient stone Moai on nearby Rapa Nui — or, as the obnoxious duo obstinately insist on correcting the other tourists around them, checking out the Big Heads on Easter Island.

M.J. euphemistically describes Chris’ loose-lipped behavior as “acting problematic” — his way of ordering Lee to kill Chris. Which makes sense, since Chris is determined to write his memoirs and potentially spill the beans on every ethically compromised overseas intervention from Guatemala and Indonesia to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. Plus his assassination of Patrice Lumumba, democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo. And there’s also that little incident in Dallas on November 22, 1963. “No one remembers the black presidents you kill,” Lee sighs. ‘But if you kill one white president, everybody goes fucking crazy.”

“He’s the entire history of the CIA, man!” says M.J., demanding his execution. Is Lee going to follow orders and shoot his best friend? Or will he indulge Chris as he reflects on the consequences of his actions? “You get old,” Chris says. “You start to question shit. Regret shit.” And if you’re Chris, you also start to pontificate. Among his looney musings: there might be dinosaurs in heaven. Finns invented the Molotov Cocktail. Good cheeses only come from gay countries.

Also: he’s secretly dying of cancer. And he already asked Lee to kill him. But he doesn’t want it to be a political hit job. He needs it to be a mercy killing. There’s a difference, and Lee loves Chris too much to not honor that wish. The question is, how does he prove that to Chris?

Regrets are a lodestar for the playwright-filmmaker, informing everything from In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to the Banshees of Inisherin, and infusing the glum hilarity of how caring but caustic people interact. “How are the kids?” Chris says in a long-distance phone call to his wife Marge (Parker Posey). “Who cares?” she sighs. The weight of a lived life and its unintended consequences sit heavily on all his characters. “Life is sad,” says a junkie. “Everything is sad. That’s why I take so much smack.”

Wild Horse Nine wallows in remorse — hysterical but horrible remorse. The world is full of curveballs: drunk spouses who fuck clowns and photos of dwarves carrying basketballs. It’s preposterous and it’s lonely and it’s cruel, a place where governments torture folk singers and wild horses end up roadkill. But McDonagh’s jagged melancholic comedy is also a tender struggle for redemption. Chris and Lee are miserable in their own ways, but they are actively searching to heal their psychic wounds and cleanse their souls, struggling to find morality and purpose on a remote island in the middle of nowhere.