John Malkovich could finally have an Oscar secret weapon, and his name is Martin McDonagh.
“Wild Horse Nine,” the black comedy that bowed in competition at the Venice Film Festival — where it drew a 13-minute standing ovation — before turning up as Telluride’s surprise patron screening on Friday afternoon, drops a pair of CIA operatives onto Easter Island in the tense days before the 1973 Chilean coup, then lets the absurdity metastasize from there.
The ensemble is deep and soars — Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Parker Posey, Chilean breakout star Mariana Di Girolamo — but the film rests on its firm two-hander: Sam Rockwell and, in the performance generating the loudest awards buzz, Malkovich.
A McDonagh movie arrives with automatic awards gravity, and he’s earned it. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin” both turned festival launches into major Oscar players — the former landing seven nominations, the latter nine — and both proved his unusual ability to make the Academy take a particular kind of movie seriously: profane, melancholy and frequently very funny, with enough emotional heft to shrug off the label of “comedy.”
Steve Buscemi and Sam Rockwell in “Wild Horse Nine”
