Being John Malkovich Not Enough To Rescue ‘Wild Horse Nine’

There is an ingenious scene in Spike Jonze’s surreal “Being John Malkovich” (1999) in which Malkovich, playing himself, enters his own mind and lands in a restaurant where everyone has his own head, and every word of dialogue, every entry on the menu, is “Malkovich”. Staring into John Malkovich’s 72-year-old irises in his latest film, “Wild Horse Nine,” is a similar window into his extraordinary career. Memories came back flooding back of his superb seducer Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988), with his catchphrase “it’s beyond my control,” and his hilariously Russian-accented Teddy KGB in “Rounders” (1998), splitting Oreos as he destroys his poker opponents.By his own reckoning, Mr. Malkovich has appeared in “150 films or so,” including one, “100 Years” (2015), that is locked in a time-release safe in Cognac, France, until its scheduled release in 2115. He has been nominated twice for an Oscar; as a bitter, blind First World War veteran in “Places in the Heart” (1984), and as a former CIA assassin opposite Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire” (1993).The prediction market Kalshi now makes him the favorite to win Best Actor for playing another CIA man, Chris Carlisle, in “Wild Horse Nine,” a 1973-set black comedy. Chris has terminal cancer, dementia and a dark past that, he boasts, includes the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the assassination of President Kennedy. He and his younger partner Lee (Sam Rockwell) are plotting with their heroin-addicted bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), to topple Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende. But when Chris, on holiday on Easter Island, starts recording his memoir and boasting to a rebellious Marxist student, Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo), MJ takes radical steps to stop him spilling the agency’s secrets.The film’s writer-director, Martin McDonagh, who won an Oscar for the short “Six Shooter” (2004), calls this “my most improvised film.” Rehearsals were held at Manhattan’s Public Theater, and the actors went off-script in almost every scene. At last night’s BAFTA screening, Mr. Malkovich said that he accepted the role because “it is a very good script.” Sadly, I saw little evidence of that.Two central plot premises — that Chris killed JFK, and that the CIA would kidnap the wife and children of one of its own agents — are too preposterous to swallow. Mr. McDonagh’s dialogue is often likened to Quentin Tarantino’s, but next to Vincent and Jules, the chatty hitmen of “Pulp Fiction,” Chris and Lee’s ruminations on the beauty of moths and whether dinosaurs go to Heaven bomb badly. Only one exchange lands: A debate on whether the best countries are those that embrace democracy, tolerate homosexuality and make excellent cheese. In a nod to Vincent’s “Royale with Cheese,” Chris informs Lee that “gay countries” like Holland, with its Goudas and Leerdammers, and England, with its Cheddar and Stilton, pass the test, while non-gay countries like America and Russia “fail” because their cheeses are “terrible.”Mr. McDonagh also plunders the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading” (2008), in which Mr. Malkovich plays another eccentric CIA man drafting his memoirs, and his own feature debut, “In Bruges” (2008), in which Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play a pair of bigmouthed, wounded hitmen. Beat for beat, this is “In Bruges” moved to the South Pacific.Worse, the movie lacks an emotional heart. The death of one of Easter Island’s wild horses is supposed to provide the story’s moral breaking point. (Of the title, Mr. McDonagh has said only: “I like numbers, and I like horses.”) He used the same device with Jenny, the doomed miniature donkey in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” but here Chris’ bond with the horse is too flimsy to jerk any tears.The story is told through a white, middle-aged, straight European male gaze, and it completely fails the Bechdel test, which requires a film to have at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Mr. McDonagh said last night: “This is my most political film. I wrote it with a lot of anger about the CIA’s record in destabilizing foreign governments. I learned about that first from a song by the Clash about what happened in Chile.” That is presumably “Washington Bullets” (1980), Joe Strummer’s lament for Allende and the murdered singer Víctor Jara. Whether or not Mr. Strummer is a reliable historian of US imperialism, using Chris to embody the entire bloodstained history of the CIA — what Mr. McDonagh called the “shitshow of America” — is as unbelievable as the dialogue.In “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” his play about Irish paramilitary violence, Mr. McDonagh used gallows humor brilliantly to find the humanity in his characters’ struggles. Not here, where the themes of guilt, late-life atonement and assisted dying are skewered by limp jokes about the Manson family. That is all the more baffling since Mr. McDonagh’s partner is the comic powerhouse Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of “Fleabag” and co-writer of “No Time to Die” (2021). A rewrite from her might have worked wonders but, alas, Mr. McDonagh has said that “we find it healthier to keep work and home separate.”Mr. McDonagh’s direction is no better than his writing. Irish lullabies wander incongruously onto the soundtrack; the flashbacks are clunky and confusing. Most disappointing is Ben Davis’s washed-out cinematography, which follows the tired trope that there was no color in the 1970s. This is only the second fiction feature ever allowed to shoot on Easter Island — an amazing opportunity to reveal what Mr. McDonagh called the “mystery and spirituality” of the moai, the island’s giant sacred stone figures. Instead, the island looks unforgivably prosaic, its moai shot like B-roll for a low-budget National Geographic Channel show.Parker Posey in ‘Wild Horse Nine.’ Searchlight PicturesWhere Mr. McDonagh does succeed is in assembling a superb cast. Mr. Buscemi, echoing his stunning black-comedy turn in “The Death of Stalin” (2017), nails it as a bullying heroin addict: “It was the nodding off that I had to practice,” he told the BAFTA audience, “mostly in the back of Ubers.” Tom Waits, as Chris’ estranged brother, and Parker Posey, as Lee’s unfaithful, clown-shagging wife, are worth the price of admission. Sam Rockwell, in his third McDonagh film, gives a generously subdued performance that lets Mr. Malkovich shine, like a journeyman bass player behind a charismatic lead singer.And what of our Oscar-touted leading man? Mellowed with age, the Malkovichean arsenal remains mesmerizing: The purring voice; the caustic eyebrow raises; the quizzical tilt of the mouth that catches his owlish bemusement; the dandyish flourishes of French — “eh, voilà!”; and a bottled rage that Mr. Rockwell describes as “like a hand grenade that’s about to go off.” It rightly won him the Volpi Cup for best actor at Venice this year, and a best actor nomination on January 21 looks all but certain.But will he win — or does he deserve to win — on March 14? No, on both counts. Andrew Scott’s performance as another dying man, in “Elsinore,” due out November 20, is far richer and deeper. Mr. Malkovich’s performance often feels superficial, even one-note, and he never wins the audience’s sympathy on his long, tedious journey toward death. He compares poorly with other virtuosos playing dying men, from Takashi Shimura in “Ikiru” (1952) to John Wayne in his final film, “The Shootist” (1976).Nor is there much chemistry with Mr. Rockwell. Mr. McDonagh said he wanted them “to feel like an old married couple,” and he succeeds, to the point of audience exasperation. Rather than crackling with the bromantic electricity of “Sideways,” the duo — more kooks than spooks — bicker like Vladimir and Estragon in a poor production of “Waiting for Godot,” in which nothing happens, twice. The whole film turns into a snoozefest.That’s a verdict I reach with regret. There are few artists I admire more than Mr. Malkovich, who is also a fashion designer and an accomplished winegrower. He declined an interview because he is heading today to Tokyo to direct his own adaptation of “Real World,” Natsuo Kirino’s 2003 novel.Despite his astounding artistry, his latest movie reminded me of his own verdict in “Being John Malkovich,” after tumbling out of his Malkovich Malkovich restaurant: “I have been to the dark side! I have seen a world that no man should see!”

Being John Malkovich Not Enough To Rescue ‘Wild Horse Nine’

Being John Malkovich Not Enough To Rescue ‘Wild Horse Nine’

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