Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wild Horse Nine
Any flashbacks you might experience to high school English class in the final moments of Wild Horse Nine aren’t coincidental. Martin McDonagh‘s latest dark comedy closes with John Malkovich‘s alter ego, memory-challenged CIA agent Chris Carlisle, arriving at a destination that’s sure to stir latent memories of reading John Steinbeck’s classic novella Of Mice and Men — or watching the 1992 film version that starred Malkovich and Gary Sinise — while waiting for the bell to ring.
That story, of course, ends in the California countryside with itinerant farmhand Lennie (Malkovich) being shot in the back of the head by his friend and protector George (Sinise) as the gentle giant dreamily talks about seeing the rabbits he hoped to raise on their own patch of land. Wild Horse Nine concludes on Easter Island with Chris on the receiving end of a bullet fired by his friend and fellow agent Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) just as Chris shares the truth about his involvement in the JFK assassination. No rabbits are spoken of or seen as Chris dies, but some of the wild horses that roam that idyllic Pacific isle are conspicuously close by.
“They’re just big rabbits with slightly smaller ears,” Malkovich jokes to Gold Derby about the horses that take the place of Lennie’s rabbits — as well as the larger parallels between those two death scenes, which are separated by nearly 35 years and a literal ocean. “Next film; we’ll get back to rabbits next film,” McDonagh adds with a smile.
As both Malkovich and McDonagh acknowledged to us, Wild Horse Nine knowingly draws on aspects of characters that the two-time Oscar nominee has played over the years, including Of Mice and Men to In the Line of Fire. “I have loved the danger that John brings to certain characters over the years, as well as the comedy or sensitivity he brings to others,” the writer-director notes. “I wanted to make sure that all of those things were in this one character, and I knew John would be able to be dangerous, funny, heartbroken and heartbreaking. There isn’t another actor of his generation who can do all of those things.”
And Malkovich agrees that Chris’s fate does echo Lennie’s final moments, while also crediting Martin with finding a fresh spin on the idea of one friend sacrificing another. It’s worth noting that in the case of Wild Horse Nine, Chris has specifically asked Lee to serve as his executioner; it’s revealed early on that the elder agent is suffering from advancing dementia as well as terminal cancer — not to mention a boss (Steve Buscemi) who is just as eager to see Chris six feet under thanks to the secrets he’s carrying in his increasingly slippery memory… secrets like his aforementioned role in the Kennedy assassination.
“Lennie didn’t know what was coming, but Chris did,” emphasizes Malkovich. “So with Chris, there’s a kind of gratefulness that [Lee] did this big of an ask for him. There’s a lot of gratefulness in [that scene], which is absent from Of Mice and Men because Lennie doesn’t know what’s coming — he’s thinking about his rabbits.
“George has a similar misery to Lee in that they’re both doing it for the right reason,” the actor adds. “That’s what has to be done… it’s a bad thing for the greater good as the characters say.”
Throughout the film, McDonagh seeds the ground for Chris’s fate via regular references to the Hank Williams song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which includes a lyric about a robin that’s lost its will to live. That particular allusion also sets up one of Chris’s final — and funniest — zingers when he tells Lee in the moments leading up to his death, “Don’t you think there should be more songs about suicidal birds?”
“That verse has always struck me as intriguingly written,” McDonagh explains about how he approached his spin on a Steinbeckian finale. “Writing a scene like that, an audience knows where we’re going to end up at the start. It’s almost about delaying that as beautifully and as gently as you can and not making it heavy. There should be enough sort of fun stuff and sad stuff along the way when the moment does come up, [it arrives at] just the right time.”
For a filmmaker and playwright who isn’t shy of some good old-fashioned bloodletting — see a A Behanding in Spokane or In Bruges for evidence — McDonagh avoids showing Chris’ death in gruseeome detail. McDonagh confirms that he didn’t shoot any graphic takes. “The only close-ups we had in that scene were going from John to the horses or to sky,” he says. “It was never every going to be a bloody ending. That moment isn’t about goriness or gratuity — it’s about something you don’t want to see.
“You could almost say that the shot that’s in the film shows too much,” the director adds. “But I felt like you needed to see it, because you’re also seeing the [background] and the horses all in one shot.”
Chris’s final scene isn’t just a moving farewell for moviegoers; it also brought Malkovich’s co-stars to tears — even the ones who didn’t witness it on set. “I’m going to start crying talking about it,” admits Parker Posey, who plays Lee’s estranged wife, Marge. “The film is building to that moment, and there’s such beauty in that and also beauty in being a fan of John’s work. When something works so naturally like that scene, there’s a soulfulness and beauty that fills your heart.”
