Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine” is about nothing less than the planning of a coup d’état. We are in Chile in the spring of 1973; Salvador Allende is still the country’s democratically elected president. Two CIA agents are on the ground; they know that the Agency is preparing a regime change. The terminally ill Chris (John Malkovich) doesn’t mince his words and, in passing, lists his missions – Guatemala in 1954 (successful), 1960 Congo (successful), 1961 Bay of Pigs (not so successful); he claims to have had nothing to do with Dallas in 1963. His track record: 68 people killed; his younger colleague Lee (Sam Rockwell) has only managed 8.
Before things get serious, they fly off for a week to Easter Island, Rapa Nui, as the locals call it. At the airport, to Lee’s horror, Chris tells two Chilean female students what lies in store for them in September: Allende’s death, the military takeover, and the future repression and murder of opposition figures. As if he were a clairvoyant, he can see into the future, but the two young women take him for a mad rambling fool. It is one of the film’s twists – at times bitter, at times bitterly comic – that one of them is herself in the service of the CIA.
On Easter Island, the two Americans look at the oversized stone heads known as moai – which they simply call ‘The Big Heads’. Little by little, we learn more about the two men: about Chris’s illness and Lee’s marital problems. All the while, they continue to revel in their cynical banter, which makes the film so entertaining as it oscillates between black humour and bloody reality. While we, the audience, believe we know the historical events, a major mystery of contemporary history is revealed at the end – as long as one is willing to believe a film that, amongst other things, plays on our willingness to believe.
John Malkovich is magnificent as a clownish CIA agent who, on one day, no longer remembers what he said the other day. Sam Rockwell is constantly preoccupied with food and, as his sidekick, is allowed to come across as more intelligent than in the 2017 film *Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri*. The duo explores the ambivalences of a male friendship, a theme Martin McDonagh had already explored in *The Banshees of Inisherin*. *White Horse Nine* is a real cinematic treat.
The second film, a Japanese production tackling a controversial topic in American politics, is raw and bloody. It deals with the Vietnam War, which Allen Nelson found himself caught up in as an 18-year-old Black Marine in 1966. His autobiography, *Why Did You Kill People, Mr. Nelson?* (currently available only in Japanese translations, but not in the original English) provides the basis for the film of the same name by Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto. The war veteran can no longer cope with reality; he lives homeless on the streets until a former school friend and teacher persuades him to speak to her class about his experiences in Vietnam. All his life, Allen Nelson (Rodney Hicks) has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); it is only through a long psychoanalytical process that he is able to put his experiences into words. Time and again, his therapist, Dr Daniels (Geoffrey Rush), asks him: ‘Why did you kill people?’ Until Allen finally realises that he was not merely following orders, but that there was such a thing as a desire to kill.
Between the therapy sessions, Tsukamoto – who operates the camera himself – inserts flashbacks of brutal violence and mass shootings. Every village is regarded as a Vietcong hideout, and all the inhabitants as sympathisers who are killed indiscriminately to boost the necessary ‘body count’ that indicates the war is being won. Villages are burnt to the ground until only smouldering ruins remain. My Lai, the film suggests, was not the monstrous exception tried in a court of law, but the rule.
As viewers, we empathise with the war veteran as he recalls his experiences; he loses his temper when his stepson comes home from school with a Marine Corps recruitment leaflet. It takes Allen Nelson a tremendous amount of effort to talk about what he has been through, but he forces himself to do so. Eventually, he is even invited to give talks in Japan, where he finds an attentive audience. On one occasion, he also travels to Vietnam, where he receives a particularly critical reception. When Allen Nelson dies from the long-term effects of Agent Orange poisoning, he is buried in a temple in Japan.’
'Why Did You Kill People, Mr Nelson?’ is an extraordinarily emotional film that not only serves as a reminder of American war crimes, but also offers a commentary on the renewed, harrowing current relevance of war.