“To be or not to be”: Hamlet
Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine picks up on Shakespeare’s thoughts about suicide and death, the willfulness of one and the inevitability of the other in a dark comedy about one CIA assassin in 1973 who has cancer and the other charged with eliminating his memoir about their bloody operations.
Chris (John Malkovich) has at least eight bodies to his credit while facing death and becoming philosophical, as is usual for those close to the end. His partner, Lee (Sam Rockwell), is more dismissive and almost cavalier about their profession, and as it turns out, their friendship. Less demonstrative about their bromance, he nonetheless agonizes about being responsible for eventually offing his buddy.
It’s hard not to parse the Easter Island location as a promise for resurrection of the protagonists in some way exonerating them for past deeds and present change of heart or at least profession. The comparison between the arguing friends in Wild Horse Nine and Irishman Samuel Beckett’s tramps in Waiting for Godot is inescapable—our heroes are waiting for a change of life as they wait slowly for some force to change their lives if not their fate.
Meanwhile the heroes keep going, in Chris’s case saving the lives of two young women by predicting the downfall of Salvatore Allende in 1973 Chile. As Chris and Lee may have something to do with the transition to the Pinochet murderous regime, Chris at least has a tacit remorse. He also carries the Winchester that brought down JFK in 1993. That he cannot escape his responsibility for some serious murders that changed the world, he can still love Lee and JFK and even the ladies they meet on Easter Island.
Although it doesn’t sound like it, Wild Horse Nine has an abundance of humor, particularly of the dark bromantic kind, all leading to the awareness of good and evil coexisting and the chance of redemption up to the end. In this way, other buddy stories from McDonagh like In Bruges and Banshees of Inisherin share the melancholy of guilt and friendship among men.
Wild Horse Nine
Director: Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)
Screenplay: McDonagh
Cast: John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri)
Length: 1h 58m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com