Wild Horse Nine

Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich

I was reasonably entertained by Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, but have grown weary of the thematic and schematic repetition of his cinematic efforts. The man can write dialogue, especially duologues for men, but seems to think that history is psychopathology writ large. His male protagonists are invariably flawed and even, as in Wild Horse Nine, when they are authorized to enforce order, they live outside the law. The problem with Wild Horse Nine is that McDonagh uses the trappings of realism, with 70s period detail and music. to portray the CIA as cartoon villains. I've known CIA agents, even way back in the 1970s, and none of them dressed in the Starsky and Hutch castoffs that Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich don here. Malkovich is a 72 (!) year old cancer ridden agent who wants his younger partner (Rockwell) to ice him while they are taking a vacation on Easter Island. Malkovich is shooting morphine and his superior at the agency (Steve Buscemi) is a heroin addict.

A dark, wacky CIA then. Now I think the CIA is fair game for satire, but Wild Horse Nine boasts few genuine laughs. Malkovich does what he can, his gay cheese countries diatribe will probably win him an Oscar, but Burn After Reading is a funnier film. McDonagh over loads the film into a mythic tableau about Amerika. Malkovich's agent was not only involved with coups in Guatemala, Chile, and the Congo, but also oversaw the JFK assassination on the grassy knoll. This is over egging the pudding. Anyone who believes the CIA were competent enough to off JFK should brush up on their history. When we see Malkovich's estranged brother (Tom Waits), we find he is a hermit living amidst the splendor of, get ready for the over statement, Monument Valley. In a similar vein is the treatment of the wild horses on Easter Island. As in John Huston and Arthur Miller's The Misfits, the wild horses are some sort of half-assed statement about lost freedom, but what they really are is a metaphor too far.

That said I really enjoyed the interplay between Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. It is a pleasure. McDonagh doesn't write as well for women, but I appreciated the efforts of Parker Posey and Mariana di Girolamo. McDonagh facility with dialogue attracts stellar casts, but it seems like, in terms of cinematic output, he has been spinning his wheels since Seven Psychopaths.

The Currents

Isabel Aimié González Sola

Milagros Mumenthaler's The Currents is a riveting portrait of a woman's mental disorientation. Isabel Aimié González Sola plays Lina, a chic designer who we see receive an award for her work in the opening scene. She thereupon bins the ugly trophy (see above) and takes a leap off the nearest bridge into the Rhine. The authorities are not too concerned with her and deposit her back to her luxury hotel. Lina travels back to her home in Buenos Aires, but her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and daughter, Sofia, both sense that she is preoccupied and distant. Her able assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) also gleans Lina's disconnection.

Lina leads an enviable bourgeois life. The film's display of stylish shoes, dresses lipstick, make-up, and hair treatments stands in contrast to Lina's emotional desolation. Pedro is a bit dim emotionally, but is well intentioned and a doting father. His parents are fabulously wealthy, their home a veritable museum. Lina's lineage remains a mystery till well into the movie and when we finally meet Lina's mother, the audience has more than a clue in regards to the source of Lina's discontent. 

The film is stylish and knotty, but not overly so. As one of the film's characters puts it, there is enough "artifice to fill the void." A light house scene in which Lina blanks out while we see other characters revel in ecstasy and community seems too artsy-fartsy to me, but the film, on the whole, does a good job showing something that often seems invisible. Ms. Sola gives us one of the year's most multifaceted performances. The psychic terrain of Lina is mapped out by Mr. Mumenthaler using Ms. Sola's body. This meditation on the female form presents thanatos rather than eros looming. A brief glimpse of the expanse of Lina's hair across the back of a couch achieves a keening sense of horror and mortality. Highly Recommended.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun's most successful and accomplished film to date. The 1980s inspired mise-en-scene from I Saw the TV Glow is repeated and elevated thanks to a first rate cast and knowingly cheesy special effects. Schoenbrun's themes of transgression, sexual fluidity, and dysmorphia are once again articulated, perhaps overly so. However, Schoenbrun's love for pop culture permeates and lifts the film. The artifacts of pop culture litter the film: 1980s horror film bespoke ephemera, KFC, and lots of brightly packaged candy. Sch💜enbrun 💙s them all, but she is ambivalent enough to fear what pop culture has done to our psyches and bodies. This is the Cronenbergian strain in their work and they toss in a Videodrome reference in acknowledgement.

Teenage Sex... is, of course replete with film references: Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Schoenbrun is savvy enough about her obsessive cinephilia to joke about an overly academic or meta approach to movies in the flick. Her surrogate in the film, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a rising queer indie filmmaker who wants to remake a beloved horror film of her youth. The final girl in that film was played by a young actress named Billy Presley who eventually disappeared from view. Now older and embodied by Gillian Anderson, she lives a reclusive existence living, holy Miss Havisham, in the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma film. The mousy and frigid Kris visits Billy to talk her into participating in the new film. Einbinder reins in her charisma nicely and has a winning rapport with Anderson that papers over the film's flights of fantasy. Anderson is transfixing in full diva mode, Norma Desmond with the voice of Bette Davis. 

Billy gets Kris to loosen, plying her with grass and candy and serving as a sex therapist for the uptight younger woman. Eros and thanatos are at the core of the movie: the monster at the bottom of the lake who comes out to murder campers has an air vent shaped head, a shout out to Silent Hill, and is named "Little Death." The film posits that all one has to do to gain agency is repossess the male gaze and then liberation and orgasms will follow. This aged voice says it ain't necessarily so. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is entertaining on its own terms, but is overly enamored with its own artifice. I also thought it was too long. The satiric scenes of Hollywood players are overly broad and not particularly funny, but Schoenbrun could not resist nibbling the hand that feeds her. Still, I value the personal vision that lies at the heart of the film even if I find it a bit naive. The flirting between a Kwik-Mart clerk and an oblivious Kris is the kind of little touch that uplifts a cockeyed genre film like this.