At a highly politicized Venice Film Festival that this year has experienced a notable boycott by Hollywood studios unwilling to be exposed to uncomfortable questions, the news this Thursday is the presence of an intelligent and poetic film that could well win the Oscar and that, with John Malkovich’s performance, sets the bar very high at the Lido. It is Wild Horse Nine, a satire that goes beyond a simple denunciation of the CIA’s modus operandi in its decades-long effort to destabilize governments in Latin America to, through an agent at the exit doors (Malkovich), lead the audience to a scenario of existential beauty.
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Martin McDonagh (The Irishman, The Banshees of Inisherin) shot it in Rapa Nui, the Chilean Easter Island declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, where he was inspired by the spiritual, he says, to find the tone of the film and its way of capturing the beauty of the place. Set in the seventies, just before the CIA ends Noriega and promotes Pinochet’s coup d’état, it is also a film about two friends from the intelligence office — “a relationship I had already seen in cinema, but between fathers and sons,” the director comments — in which one of them (the other is a Sam Rockwell in a state of grace) experiences remorse for the things he has done.
McDonagh has taken a look at the historical references of these CIA actions around the globe in the last six decades… whether Guatemala, Congo, etc… “and I feel it is something that has not been talked about enough,” he confesses.
Malkovich, who arrived at the Lido with the rest of the cast — Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, and Mariana di Girolamo — says that his criteria for choosing roles has a lot to do with being able to do something he hadn’t done before, but in this case it was “a very easy decision because the script was so good.” “I have done quite a bit of what I wanted in my career, and I plan to keep doing it, I have no intention of retiring. I think others will retire me. And what I love about this role is that they are two bastards who have so little idea of what they are doing that they even present themselves as CIA and that they are there to destabilize your democracy. It’s a great idea.”
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The actor has also collaborated this year in the play The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman, a work that fuses the literature of Roberto Bolaño with classical music and tango, in which he plays Carlos Wieder, a pilot-poet of the Chilean armed forces who writes his verses in the sky with the smoke of his plane while committing brutal crimes. A character whom Pinochet finances in the search for a new Chilean poetry with fascist overtones.
It will be interesting to see how the public perceives this historical film about the CIA in 1973 given current geopolitics
Martin McDonagh
director and screenwriter
On the other hand, Wild Horse Nine was shot even before the United States kidnapped the president of Venezuela… What does Malkovich think? “I can’t think anymore,” the actor cuts in, overwhelmed by events. “For me, one of the most chilling things — McDonagh rescues him — is that they no longer need to hide, they do it in broad daylight. When we made the film it was about 1973 in Chile, but looking at it now, it’s clear that it has to do with current geopolitics. We’ll have to see how the public perceives it because, being a historical piece, it has tentacles and connections to today. It will be fascinating.”
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