THE COUNSELOR
Michael Fassbender as The Counselor / Brad Pitt as Westray / Penélope Cruz as Malkina / Javier Bardem as Reiner / Cameron Diaz as Malkina / Rosie Perez as Ruth / Bruno Ganz as Diamond Dealer Directed by Ridley Scott / Written by Cormac McCarthy |
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THE COUNSELOR
received plenty of pre-publicity notoriety based on McCarthy’s presence
alone. This is the same
literary mind that has penned masterpieces like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and
THE ROAD, but his own screenplay for THE COUNSELOR is his first original
one penned specifically for the silver screen.
His inclusion alone raises a film’s – any film’s, for that
matter - potential, but the end results are a far cry away from being in
the same high caliber echelon of his previous novels.
Somewhat ineptly – if not more than a bit confusingly – plotted
and, at times, unnecessarily verbose with its dialogue, McCarthy’s
script and the film in general inspires much listless shuffling in a
theatre chair as well as far-too-frequent watch checking; not good signs at all for a film that’s supposed to tease,
tantalize, and intrigue us. The title of the
film refers to both the main character – a lawyer – and actually the
name he’s referred to as throughout the entire film.
No…really! “The
Counselor” (Michael Fassbender, a magnificent screen presence, doing
what can with the material provided) is an attorney that has fallen on
truly hard times. He’s
desperate for his next big cash score, so he aspires to join the ranks of
a large-scale drug deal involving Reiner (Javier Bardem, sporting yet
another outlandish hairdo for a film) and Westray (a never more dour and
sulky looking Brad Pitt). The
trio are attempting to plan a massive cartel delivery from Mexico to
Chicago, but complications, as you would expect, ensue.
Meanwhile, the Counselor is courting the love of his life Laura
(Penelope Cruz) to become his wife, and with the prospect of a hug payday
coming, the possibilities of a happy life for them both seems likely.
Serious setbacks
begin to arise in the smuggling plan.
The drugs themselves – secretly housed inside shipment containers
that also carry raw sewage containers – is hijacked on route by some
vicious assailants, and to make matters worse the Counselor also manages
to catch the unwanted attention of the cartel leadership that wants him
dead as a result of some of his more underhanded dealings.
Realizing that both his and his future wife’s lives hang
desperately in the balance, the lawyer frantically tries to pull himself
together to atone to those in power for his
business sins. Regretfully
for him, the drug kingpins are less than forgiving chaps, which leaves the
Counselor stuck between a rock and very hard place. Of the film’s
few positives I will say this: THE COUNSELOR is an unendingly dark,
macabre, and emotionally bleak work.
It’s replete with morally dicey personas, none of which are
particularly likeable. McCarthy’s
script also manages to investigate the nature and themes of bad moral
choices rather well, as it effectively demonstrates the mental unravelling
of its main character when bad choices leads to consequences, panic, and
then mental breakdown. Ridley
Scott – one of the most supremely gifted visual filmmakers around – is
also kind of surprisingly and refreshingly subdued in terms of his
aesthetic choices in the film. He
paints the screen with modest stylistic choices that help to frame and
accentuate the characters and performances.
Since this is a film that’s attempting to be a heavily character driven, it’s appropriate that Scott
let’s his typically robust artistic impulses settle down so that they
don’t become an obtrusive distraction. Yet, the problem
with the film is that, deep down, I didn't develop, nor maintain, any
semblance on interest in any of the characters here.
The film never invests in its characters nearly as much as it
thinks it does, despite the fact that it’s wall-to-wall with heavy
dialogue exchanges that sometimes go on…and on…and on…and frequently
do little to lay out who these people are.
Sometimes, the conversations between characters become almost
tediously off-putting as many of them go off on weird monologues that
don’t really tend to propel the plot forward in any reasonable manner. Normally, I have no problem with this approach (a writer like
Quentin Tarantino, for instance, knows how to harness colorful
exchanges between characters that don’t necessarily add to the plot, per
se), but McCarthy’s words here are so dense, monotonous, and oftentimes
lifeless that viewers will, no doubt, wonder what they really amount
to…as I did. This is all not
helped by the fact that the performances here range from pretty decent to
incredulously over-the-top to the point of vile caricature.
Fassbender is arguably the most grounded of the actors in his
approach here, and Pitt is nicely understated too.
Javier Bardem is barely in the film enough to make an impression,
so he lets his flamboyant wardrobe choices do most of the talking.
Then there is Cameron Diaz, who plays Bardem’s girlfriend in the
film, a character so broadly defined that you want to laugh at her (she
sports a cheetah tattoo on her body…and actually has cheetahs as pets!).
She also is a grand ringmaster here, manipulating everyone with
relative ease, even though the script never really fully explains how
she’s capable of this. She
does occupy arguably the film’s most memorable – if not campy –
sequence, where she boasts to Reiner that she wants to fornicate…with
his Ferrari, which she…does. It
is, without question, one of the strangest sex scenes in movie history. Despite sensationalistic and sleazy moments like this, THE COUNSELOR never even manages to elevate itself to the level of cheekily enjoyable B-grade trash because, quite frankly, the character dynamics are just not all that enjoyable in the film. This, in turn, leaves the film being largely unsatisfying and not very pleasing to sit through. The end of the film ends with an abrupt stop for the sake of quickly ending the film, I think, seeing as perhaps Scott and McCarthy don’t seem to have an idea of how to adequately conclude the film. I would hasten to label this film – as many critics have – as a bad one; it’s more of an ambitiously mediocre one with good core ingredients that are not properly mixed together. That, and I never thought I’d be bored senseless by the cinematic pairing of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy. Not. At. All. |
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