Wild Horse Nine, The Gift that Kept on Giving – A Review

This review contains no spoilers.

I went to my first Screen Unseen yesterday, with no idea what I was about to watch. It turned out to be Wild Horse Nine. I could get used to this.

Martin McDonagh sends Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) as two CIA men with business to attend to and plenty of other things to argue about first. Somebody has said something ridiculous, and the other is entitled to make that a problem. Much of the film’s humour comes from these exchanges, and there was a great deal of laughter at my theatre showing.

McDonagh is happy to leave a line hanging. He always gives the recipient time to react, lets us enjoy the response, sometimes returns to a remark that was funny enough the first time and gets another laugh simply by bringing it up again. It is wonderfully irreverent writing, delivered by actors who know how to make the most of the space around it. Rockwell and Malkovich are so good together that listening to them becomes an attraction in itself. The relaxed pace suits them beautifully. There is time for a conversation to become a hell of a lot more trouble than it needed to be.

Malkovich continues to make excellent acting look suspiciously like something he was going to do anyway. He gives so little impression of trying that I occasionally wonder how much of this he would acknowledge as work. The writing fits him beautifully, and as always, gives us the goods.

Rapa Nui was a surprising discovery. I realised while watching that I had never really known what the place looked like, and Wild Horse Nine is a gorgeous introduction. The photography gives you plenty to look at beyond the actors, so that even while I was enjoying their conversations I found myself taking in the surroundings. I liked the occasional switches to the look of the characters’ old video camera, too. Those rougher images have a charm of their own alongside the beauty of the main photography, and I enjoyed seeing the film play with both.

The gunshots, sparingly as they are,  are massively loud. After all that leisurely conversation, their sudden force really registers in comparison to typical portrayals. I appreciated how abrupt they sounded, how thoroughly a single shot could interrupt the comfortable rhythm of listening to these men talk.

A more relaxed, more openly tender In Bruges is the closest comparison to how Wild Horse Nine felt to me. It has that enjoyment of people being absurd while taking themselves perfectly seriously. What stayed with me most, though, was how heartfelt it was.

Knowing somebody well gives you plenty to argue about, and neither man seems inclined to waste that advantage. Rockwell and Malkovich make their characters’ affection apparent throughout the bickering, and I found their friendship deeply moving and bittersweet. The tenderness belongs to those same conversations that had the cinema laughing. Given the subject matter, I hadn’t expected to come away from Wild Horse Nine feeling quite so warmly towards it.

Somebody else chose this film for my evening. I would happily choose it for yours. You’ll enjoy yourself.