Charlie Kaufman, the much-lauded screenwriter of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Adaptation” and, yes, “Being John Malkovich,” had no real reason for choosing Malkovich for his script about an actor’s brain that could be crawled into for 15 minutes before it tossed the visitor onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. All Kaufman could come up with was that the name needed to be fun to say in repetition, something the movie would gleefully confirm.
Kaufman assumed not just that the movie would never be made but also that John Malkovich probably would never even read the script. When Malkovich did, he was fascinated, but also a little confused: “Why not ‘Being Tom Cruise’?” he asked. He signed on not long afterward and even asked director Spike Jonze not to take anything out because it made him look bad. He has always been fearless that way.
Malkovich made his film debut as an extra in Robert Altman’s 1978 film “A Wedding,” which is to say he’s been a part of our cinematic lives for nearly 50 years. He has played killers and con men and lovers and rock stars and aristocrats. He has played Tom Ripley, King Charles II, F.W. Murnau, Secretariat’s trainer and, of course, himself. He is so revered among his fellow actors that one of Matt Damon’s most famous anecdotes is about how, when he was younger, he was absolutely terrified to meet Malkovich.
But despite nearly 100 movie credits, Malkovich remains slippery. He operates on his own rhythms and cadences, always a jolt of clipped, chaotic energy that seems like it could have been beamed in from another universe. Which is why I’m not sure he’s ever had a better role than his lead performance in the new film “Wild Horse Nine.” And I wonder if it’s going to win him his first Oscar.
The film is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, the force behind “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “In Bruges.” Like those films, “Wild Horse Nine” features characters who are endlessly entertaining to listen to, even as they seem utterly lost to themselves. Malkovich plays Chris, an aging CIA operative. Chris has just helped set up an impending military coup in Chile and absconded to Easter Island with his partner, Lee (played by Sam Rockwell, who won an Oscar for “Three Billboards”). His plan is simple: He’s dying of cancer and wants Lee, his closest friend and a seasoned professional, to put him out of his misery with a bullet. But first he wants to see, as he calls them, “the big heads.”
The film, one of the few movies to be filmed on Easter Island (which looks fantastic), is ostensibly a thriller. Their boss, a CIA honcho played by Steve Buscemi, wants to take Chris out sooner rather than later because Chris is working on a memoir that may reveal the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination (something “Wild Horse Nine,” amusingly, treats as established fact). But the movie is really a rumination on death, loss and regret, as Chris looks back at his life, not always with much self-awareness, and wonders whether the good cause he thought he’d been fighting for was, in fact, a good cause at all.
Malkovich’s Chris is intelligent, literate and loquacious, like all of McDonagh’s characters. But what makes him different is how Malkovich plays him. Malkovich’s best roles have always had a shiftiness to them; he wants you to know he has a secret, and also to know that he’s not going to tell you what it is. Chris isn’t a likable character, necessarily. But he’s an irresistible one, a smart man in the final stage of his life who realizes he may have outsmarted himself. To watch him wrestle with this in McDonagh’s signature patter, and to listen to Malkovich attack each line from unusual, fascinating angles, is pure pleasure: The actor and writer are a perfect match.
But as he’s gotten older (he’ll be 73 next month), Malkovich has added a fragility to his repertoire that gives the movie, and his performance, a pathos. We’ve watched Malkovich for half a century, after all, and we’ve never been able to quite figure him out. What’s remarkable about Chris, as Malkovich plays him, is that he can’t figure himself out either. Did he live a good life? Did he make the world a better place? Is that even possible? Chris doesn’t have the answers, even at the end. Most of us don’t.
For all his global panache (he lived in France for a decade, owns a club in Lisbon and became a Croatian citizen this year) and his sometimes extraterrestrial vibe (he might also occasionally live on Mars), Malkovich’s roots are in the rural Midwest: He, like me, grew up in Southern Illinois. (He attended Eastern Illinois University; go Panthers!) He is unmistakably himself — no one has ever been confused with John Malkovich — but still able to hide in plain sight.
Malkovich has not been nominated for an Oscar since 1993’s “In the Line of Fire.” That’s about to change. After all these years, we still can’t get our arms around what it actually means to be John Malkovich. He’s an actor like no other, yet we hardly know him at all. Which is exactly what an actor’s job is supposed to be.
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