By Preston Wilder
A word about expectations. This is not ‘the new Brad Pitt movie’, as John and Jane Bloggs might surmise (though they’d probably avoid it if it were, given Pitt’s bravely offbeat choices in recent years), nor is it ‘the new Michael Fassbender movie’ even though he plays the title character, an unnamed lawyer known only as ‘Counsellor’. Then again, it’s not really ‘the new Ridley Scott movie’ either, as John and Jane Cinephile might expect; Scott’s trademark flash and visual pyrotechnics aren’t much in evidence. The Counsellor is actually ‘the new Cormac McCarthy movie’ – a name, in all probability, that only John and Jane Bookworm will even recognise, though McCarthy’s prize-winning novels have been adapted into films, most successfully with No Country for Old Men.
I’ve read one of the books (All the Pretty Horses) and watched most of the adaptations, and I have to say I’m not a big fan; behind the lean, consciously pared-down prose seems to lie a lurid fascination with violence and po-faced belief in capital-E Evil, all of which is rather indigestible. Still, 80-year-old McCarthy is an unmistakable voice – and The Counsellor, his first original screenplay, is that rare thing, a writer’s vision brought to the screen without the usual compromises. This is a unique film, likely to alienate many more people than it pleases. The hero does nothing heroic, the plotting is deliberately thin, the danger (though repeatedly talked about) is never clearly delineated, and talky scene follows talky scene till the whole thing collapses in a haze of hints and half-measures.
The film could (and maybe should) be seen as a very dry comedy. What happens is simple enough: the Counsellor gets involved in drug trafficking, things go wrong, and a ruthless Mexican cartel takes revenge on him and his friends. There’s a kind of gallows humour in the general air of helplessness, not to mention the constant foreshadowing; we keep being told of bad things happening – like the bolito, a Mexican murder weapon that “keeps going till the noose closes completely” – and we know they’re going to happen, the noose sure to close around the Counsellor. The florid dialogue adds to the fun: “It was hallucinatory. You see a thing like that, it changes you,” marvels Javier Bardem – which is amusing, but even more amusing in that he’s talking about a naked Cameron Diaz rubbing against a car windshield. Even a grisly decapitation is funny, because of the scene that precedes it (a motorbike being carefully measured) – but that’s only funny in retrospect, which is typical of the film’s maddening quality.
The Counsellor is indeed quite maddening. It’s obvious that the film is doing something unusual and potentially interesting – but its actual pleasures are few and far between. The pace is slack; McCarthy’s script meanders – at one point we go from a nightclub to a desert stakeout to a polo field to a church, each scene unrelated to the previous one – and the talk is exhausting and monotonous. There are lots of big words and tortuous locutions, but the scenes just hang there and nothing sparks off anything else. I’ve always found the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men overrated, but at least the Coens realised that McCarthy’s barren nihilism needs something to bounce off – that you need suspense, for instance, in order to sell the joke that there is no suspense. This film is one-note, and it turns into a slog.
None of this would matter if it were profound, but in fact one struggles to discern (a) if the script is really saying anything, and (b) whether what it’s saying is really as dubious and objectionable as it sounds. It’s a fine line; when, for instance, Pitt opines that Mexicans are “a different species”, McCarthy clearly isn’t being racist – Mexicans (as in Mexican cartels) are simply his implacable Other, like the hitman in No Country – but some touch of irony might’ve been nice, just to reassure us that he knows how it sounds. It’s even more apparent in the (many) observations about women, the fickleness of women – “You can do anything to them except bore them” – the callous promiscuity of women, especially since the film seems to operate (quite unambiguously) on a Madonna/whore dichotomy, with Penelope Cruz as the church-going nice girl and Diaz the obvious slut. At some point you may wonder – Pulitzer Prize or no Pulitzer Prize – if you really want to listen to the ramblings of an 80-year-old dude with a thing for violence.
Absolutely everyone (except the Counsellor) rambles in The Counsellor; even minor characters offer wry aphorisms and philosophical discourses. Among the most memorable is an elderly diamond seller (played by the great Bruno Ganz) who gets a bona fide laugh when our hero says he wouldn’t want to buy Cruz a diamond so big that she’ll be afraid to wear it – “She is probably more courageous than you imagine,” replies Ganz dryly – and later pontificates on diamonds as a way of declaring that “we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives”. The Counsellor is a fascinating film, but it’s diminished by the brevity of our lives: it’s got Death on the brain, and its morbid obsession ends up sucking all the energy out of it. It’s singular and fatalistic, and by all means watch it. Just don’t expect to enjoy it.
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
STARRING Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt
US 2013 117 mins
