Martin McDonagh, in Venice with Wild Horse Nine, said he had been "very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they've done all around the world." [1] Philip Oltermann's Guardian dispatch, timed Thursday afternoon, leads on that sentence. Festival copy will file the Langley line. The engine is 1970s Chile. McDonagh also said the United States' history of intervening in democratic processes "deserves more attention in the light of current political developments." [1] The film is already being called Oscar-tipped. That is a booking market. Santiago is the setting.
Wednesday this paper reported that George Clooney used a Golden Lion to defend Mark Ruffalo's attack on the Paramount-Warner merger, and that the file was merger math and Oracle contracts, not an antisemitism charge. Thursday is a different invoice. John Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran CIA agent stationed in Santiago on the eve of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist president. [1] Recently diagnosed with cancer, he is sent to Easter Island with his protégé Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, and begins to feel, McDonagh said, "guilt and regret about the things he has done." [1]
The film's accounting of those things includes the 1954 Guatemalan coup, the 1961 killing of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, and — in the film's telling — the killing of John F. Kennedy. [1] Those are the film's claims, not a new historical brief. Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, and Tom Waits are in the cast. Searchlight Pictures is on the stills. This is McDonagh's first film since The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022. [1] He had started a father-and-son actors script. It only gelled, he said, when he tied it to the US-supported overthrow of Allende. "It took it away from something a bit corny to somewhere much sadder and darker." [1] The Guardian still's second caption calls the picture "sadder and darker." That is the Chile file, not a Clooney recap.
"We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don't question the CIA's activity as much as we ought to," he said. [1] Asked at the press conference about the Trump administration's capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January, the American actors looked unwilling. "I can't think any more," Malkovich said. [1] London-born Irish national McDonagh took the microphone. "One of the frightening things is that they don't seem to be making it covert any more, which is very strange," he said. "Like in the 70s, at least these horrible people had the intelligence to keep their acts secret, but it just feels like things are getting stupider and stupider and stupider." [1] He added that he wrote the picture to talk about 1973. Watching it now, "it does feel like it does seem to have a bit of a commentary on present day geopolitics." [1]
The photograph of McDonagh between Rockwell and Malkovich carries the caption the paper wants kept: "We don't question the CIA's activity as much as we ought to." [1] English-language Venice copy spent Wednesday on Clooney, Ruffalo, and Danny Boyle's Murdoch picture. A Hollywood title that uses Pinochet-era Chile as its moral machinery is the Latin American file on the Lido. Sergei Loznitsa's complaint about a cinema grant was who pays for the festival. McDonagh's presser is which country the prestige picture is actually about. A CIA man dying of cancer on Easter Island is a vehicle. The 1973 coup is the cargo. Malkovich has already been tipped as an Oscar contender for the lead. [1] That is English copy doing what English copy does. The setting is still Santiago, still Allende, still Chile. Studio-adjacent X will still file prestige-pic politics. Festival MSM will still file a director versus Langley. Flatten the quote and you lose the country. Watch it as a Clooney follow and you miss that the new title has a new one.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles