Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich play CIA agents tasked with overthrowing the Chilean government. New wild horse.
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Place has always played a particularly important role in the work of Anglo-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. Several of his pieces, such as The Lieutenant of Inishmoreowe their name to their Irish coastal setting. But he also ventured further abroad, notably in his films. He went to Belgium to In Bruges and in the American Midwest for Three billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri.
Most of his new film, New wild horsetakes place on Easter Island, which, located more than 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, is one of the most remote places on Earth. Wherever it takes place, however, a McDonagh film is a McDonagh film, peppered with strange twists, jolts of violence and profanity galore. Take out all the swearing and it could barely last an hour.
It begins in 1973, in Santiago. John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, a CIA agent who has been doing the dirty work of American foreign policy for years, overthrowing democratically elected leaders everywhere from Guatemala to the Congo. He is about to do it again in Chile; the military coup that will overthrow President Salvador Allende and install the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet will take place in a few months.
In one scene, Chris and his young partner, Lee Chesterfield – played by Sam Rockwell – wait for a flight to Easter Island, where they are going for a week’s vacation. While talking with two Chilean students, Chris blurts out what’s going to happen, telling them, “We came here to destabilize your democracy, and it’s going great.”
Chris isn’t usually this reckless. But he suffers from terminal cancer and early-onset dementia, which, combined with a constant dose of morphine, have loosened his tongue. Malkovich’s performance cleverly blurs our perception of Chris’s mental state: are his mistakes real or part of a long-running scam? This question becomes even more pressing when Chris announces that he plans to die on Easter Island and wants Lee to do it – a quick, painless death, administered by a professional and a trusted friend.
Lee likes Chris and doesn’t want to go along with the plan. Meanwhile, the head of the CIA’s South American office, played by Steve Buscemi, even more dyspeptic than usual, is watching them closely and knows that Chris is becoming a liability. Lee also has to deal with occasional harassing phone calls from his alcoholic and openly unfaithful wife, played by a Parker Posey who is more frantic than funny.
That’s mostly for the plot. Perhaps drawing inspiration from the vast open spaces of Easter Island and the wild horses that roam the landscape, McDonagh attempted to shape the film in the spirit of a comedic western. The dialogue seems slower and longer than usual, without its characteristic staccato rhythms. Nobody cuts their fingers, as in The Banshees of Inisherin; there’s little real action until the final act. I’m generally okay with a restrained, less-is-more approach, but the material here is lazily third-rate.
For much of the film, we watch Chris and Lee go through a tedious routine of joking and bickering as they explore Easter Island. However, as one of these students points out, they really should call the place by its indigenous name, Rapa Nui. This correction provokes scornful, reactionary laughter from Chris, who has 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 poke fun at people’s sensitivities towards language, which might suggest that he himself is more than a little sensitive to language.
New wild horse can be smug, but also sentimental. The film desperately wants us to like and even love Chris, which is why, I think, it gives the character a cancer diagnosis and plenty of opportunities for guilty introspection between punchlines. Despite Malkovich’s skillful performance, I never really bought the character for a single second. Even in a fictional context, it is strange that we are asked to shed tears for one of the secret architects of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Some might give New wild horse deserves to have dared, in a comic format, to first address the consequences of the American military intervention. But boldness is not enough. Despite his geopolitically astute pose, McDonagh’s point of view here is closer to that of an irreverent tourist, making his way through history…
Gn entert
