“A roaringly funny yet deeply moving spy comedy that knows how to hit the US’s cynical geopolitical workings between the eyes like a sharpshooter hiding on a grassy knoll.”

Did you know there are quite a few grassy knolls on Easter Island? It’s practically littered with them. If you ever visited you might not have noticed, unless you were a CIA agent like Chris Carlysle (John Malkovich, in the role of a lifetime), and Chris knows a grassy knoll or two. He’s been around, involved in practically every covert (and some not so covert) American operation abroad. You need an uprising quelled or a democratically elected president assassinated? Call Chris. And mind you, all of these operations were successful, he will have you know. Except for the Bay of Pigs perhaps, but oh well.

Now, however, the end is near for the aging agent. Retirement is looming, not from the agency, but from life. Chris has cancer, you see. Hard to beat that. But there is one more job to do, together with his longtime partner Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell), in Chile of all places. It’s 1973, and Salvador Allende is president of the country. A Marxist president, go figure. America can’t have that, so Chris and Lee and MJ (Steve Buscemi), the head of the CIA’s South American operations, are helping Pinochet to stage a coup. But first Chris and Lee are sent on a week-long vacation to Easter Island. Chris has resolved to start working on his memoirs, to MJ’s horror. You see, Chris has far too much information about grassy knolls, and he might know the whereabouts of the gun that shot JFK. Another resolution Chris has made is to get shot by Lee to end his misery before the cancer makes it unbearable, an agreement they made a month before their trip.

As you near the end of your time on this planet, you don’t really care about keeping secrets anymore, so when they meet two young women at the airport Chris bluntly states that they are in Chile to destabilize the country’s democracy. He keeps on telling people he is with the CIA, even warning one of the girls (Mariana Di Girólamo) not to go back to the mainland because the upcoming coup will cost thousands of lives, including possibly hers. Chris also thinks a lot about death and heaven and that sort of thing, naturally; are there dinosaurs in heaven, he wonders. There must have been good dinosaurs, the vegetarian ones.

Lee meanwhile has his own problems, because he is tasked by MJ to keep on eye on Chris, and at all costs prevent him from writing down or recording his memoirs. To hold the proverbial knife to his back, Lee’s wife (Parker Posey) and children are threatened by the agency, as insurance that he will do his job with Chris, and if needed ‘take care of him’. Lee’s marriage to Marge is a loveless one, with a lot of philandering on her part, but still.

This is the basic setup for Wild Horse Nine, the latest film by Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. In a way, it only scratches the surface, because the core of the plot, despite some double-crossing and twists and turns, is not the point. Wild Horse Nine is mainly a portrait of a man reflecting on a life full of evil, at his own hands. “Sometimes we gotta do a terrible thing for the greater good,” he says, but in his heart he doesn’t truly believe it. Maybe once he did, but since the cancer has affected his memory he can’t really recall much. Not a good thing when you want to put down your memoirs, and he has to leave notes for himself to remember the important stuff. Why is there a note in his pocket that he can’t trust Lee?

Why indeed, because besides a portrait of a man in the last days of his life, which is already poignant enough, it’s also a beautiful rumination on the power of friendship. Despite being co-workers, Chris and Lee are also good friends, sometimes even acting like a bickering couple after twenty years of marriage. About half an hour into the film McDonagh reveals the plan of Chris’s assisted suicide at the hands of his partner, and the rest of the film works to this inevitable climax. This gives McDonagh plenty of time to paint the breadth of the friendship between the two men, so when the supreme moment finally comes it’s an incredibly heartfelt and unexpectedly emotional scene. The journey towards that moment is filled with laugh-out-loud dialogue (“I’m not a junkie, I just like heroin“) and ominous symbolism (one of the wild horses that roam the island, and that Chris connects with, ends up dying), but that makes Chris’s death all the more powerful. He is not the nicest of men, but you grow to love him and his cynicism and blunt honesty all the same over the course of this journey and his existential ponderings. In the meantime, McDonagh is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) underlining the nefarious role the United States has always played in destabilizing countries, whether in South America, Africa, or Asia, especially when those countries were governed by leftist and socialist leaders. The US always protects its capitalist interest, and the line from 1973 to our current day is easily drawn based on the subtext of Wild Horse Nine. This subtext is not preachy, in fact quite factual, and despite the humor he often packages it in, McDonagh’s damaging portrayal of the US’s dark geopolitical machinations and the nonchalance with which it carries those out is unmistakable.

You need good actors to do McDonagh’s imaginative and verbose dialogue justice, and the cast is more than up to the task. Buscemi, Posey, and Di Girólamo do excellent work in more archetypical supporting roles, and even Tom Waits as Chris’s estranged brother finds the right pathos when he gets a final phone call from Chris after a decade of non-communication. But the film belongs to Rockwell and in particular Malkovich, who is firing on all cylinders to make the melancholy of his world-weary, life-weary character shine through. Chris Carlysle is cynical, has killed 68 people, many of whom probably didn’t deserve to die, and he lies with incredible ease. Still, by the end of the film you feel for this man who knows his time has come and faces it fearlessly. He and Rockwell, in top form as the serious sidekick (though a near-leading role itself) play exquisitely off each other, arguing over the morphine Chris takes for the pain or the keys to their rental car like a married couple. Malkovich’s role was initially going to be played by Christopher Walken, who would no doubt have sunk his teeth into McDonagh’s dialogue and eaten it to the bone, but Malkovich’s Walken-esque monologue linking ‘gay’ countries and cheese is one for the ages. Yet it is in the quieter moments, when Chris contemplates the things he has done with his life, and what is to come after his demise on this remote island, where Malkovich truly shines. A stare into the distance, a sigh, a wry smile; the actor uses his whole arsenal of subtleties to bring about the melancholy and warmth of a character who has made a career out of being a stone-cold killer. Wild Horse Nine is an acting fest that sees two veterans create incredibly well-rounded characters that manage to conjure up a lump in your throat by the end of the film, a roaringly funny yet deeply moving spy comedy that knows how to hit the US’s cynical geopolitical workings like a sharpshooter hiding on a grassy knoll.