A couple of gruesome beheadings, Javier Bardem in fine, yet baffling, form, Cameron Diaz having sex with a car windshield, Brad Pitt in a cowboy hat and cheetahs everywhere. What’s not to love? Yet, thinking back on The Counselor these memories seem scattered and attached to nothing. They’re memorable, yes, but not as part of a larger picture, but more as disjointed fragments of a shattered story that never comes together.
Greed, trust, the battle of the sexes and the search for wealth are at the core of this first time drug deal gone bad, but these most simplest of themes are either vaguely underwritten or drastically overwritten to the point you’re either struggling to figure out what’s going on or rolling your eyes at the obviousness of it all.
Written by Cormac McCarthy (author of “No Country for Old Men”) and directed by Ridley Scott, The Counseslor has the dark edge of a McCarthy story, but I can’t tell if it’s the screenplay that’s lacking or Scott’s ability to make it whole. The Coens’ adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country utilized similar narrative gaps, but to the film’s favor rather than to its detriment.
The Counselor begins with our titular character (Michael Fassbender) in bed with his soon-to-be fiancée (Penelope Cruz). They’re a bit sexually charged and having a little fun under the sheets, he goes down, she moans and an extended, terrible opening credit scene follows. Things are happening, cut to black, words fade into words, drugs are being packaged up, more words and then… what? Where are we? Oh, yes, The Counselor.
So monsieur Counselor is fronting some money for a load of drugs coming into the States and at each turn he’s been warned of what will happen if something goes bad. Oh, but will it go bad? Uh, you think? As much as the film would like you to believe Fassbender’s Counselor may have an ace up his sleeve, it’s quite evident his naïveté will soon get the better of him. There are a few surprises when it comes to tying up loose ends, but narratively don’t expect to have the rug pulled out from under you, the least surprising of which is the role Cameron Diaz plays in the whole thing.
Poorly written, Diaz plays Malkina, the gold-digging girlfriend to the chatterbox that is Bardem’s Reiner, who is something of a club owner and seemingly a criminal with his hands in more than a few cookie jars. When we first meet Reiner, the conversation between he and the Counselor begins like most conversations in this movie, by dealing with what’s supposedly going on in the movie only to derail and focus on something else entirely.
Here we begin with the Counselor’s decision to enter the drug trade, something everyone clearly believes he isn’t up for and says as much to his face, but it then devolves into conversations of women and Reiner’s confidence in knowing what they want while he’s clearly clueless as to anything Malkina is doing or what she knows. There’s a point here, you see, as he even admits she has to explain the intricacies of the international markets to him as numbers tick away across the monitors on his office wall. He seems to have accepted his place in his own little world, but as an audience member you’re unlikely to believe little nuggets like this won’t have a larger effect down the line.
To this I can’t help but wonder, are all the circular and meaningless conversations that take place in this film intended to throw us off the scent or do McCarthy and Scott actually believe they add some value? As weirdly amusing as it was to listen to Bardem describe Diaz’s vagina as a “catfish” as she rubbed herself up against his car’s windshield, it didn’t add anything to the film that wasn’t already there other than to add another layer to the already icy atmosphere where everything is so contained it doesn’t feel like these people are operating inside the real world, and that never really changes.
I can respect the decision to put the onus on the audience to piece the story together, but for this film to be so intentionally obtuse feels like either a mistake in the filmmaking or a drastic overestimation in what they had in the first place.
Credit certainly does go to the casting director, however. I guess in some ways it makes sense why the opening credits were so clunky and cluttered, beyond the names I’ve already mentioned the supporting cast is stacked with recognizable names, most of which have only one scene including John Leguizamo, Natalie Dormer, Goran Visnjic, Rosie Perez, Dean Norris, Bruno Ganz, Toby Kebbell, Edgar Ramirez and Rubén Blades. This doesn’t really add to the production as much as you either think to yourself, “Hey, it’s Margaery Tyrell!” or just the mere mention of diamonds later in the film conjures memories of Bruno Ganz as a diamond dealer in Amsterdam who had only a brief moment on screen only to never be heard from again.
That being the case, I actually liked virtually all the performances. In fact, if a performance went astray it was largely due to a screenplay that needed a polish and perhaps an outline. Bardem was fun, Diaz has her moments, though her character never feels authentic, and Fassbender is asked to do quite a bit of emotional heavy lifting, largely ranging from paranoid to gutted.
Even still, good performance or not, Fassbender’s Counselor is never fleshed out. We don’t connect or care about him or his plight. We don’t care about any of these characters. They do things because that’s what they’re doing and not a single one of them is afraid of taking the spotlight with one of several long monologues, occasionally germane to the topic at hand, but more frequently dealing with whatever it is they feel like talking about.
I’ll admit I still have a strange level of curiosity when it comes to this film, but only because of the large amount of talent involved and the underwhelming result. There are several scenes that work, but they work independent of one another and the film as a whole. There will probably be some people that fall for the film’s chilling atmosphere and that will be enough, but it’s just too clumsily conceived for me to give it much of a pass on first viewing.
