The Counselor

When it was released in 2013, Ridley Scott's The Counselor was, more or less, universally derided.  Despite an all-star cast, the movie was said to be nearly unwatchable with a script by Cormac McCarthy that was so bad as to be risible.  (In fact, the movie was denounced in such terms as to cause re-evaluation of some of McCarthy's more recent novels.)  However, recently the Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro has suggested that The Counselor is better than its reputation and has been severely underestimated.  Accordingly, I thought that I would take an look at the movie.  Del  Toro is highly inconsistent himself and, generally, overrated in my view, but he's an important film maker with a good eye for genre films and his critical views are worth consideration.

In fact, The Counselor is entertaining.  It's not a bad film by any means.  Much of it is ridiculous, but this arises from its rather bizarre aspirations.  McCarthy's script is primitive by any standards, but, certainly, contains a number of soliloquy-like scenes that succinctly present themes present in the novelist's works -- for better or worse, the director (and his actors) treated McCarthy's screenplay with reverence (I recall that a few pages were published in The New Yorker) and what's on-screen is all intentional.  My Blu-Ray of the film is 137 minutes long and appears to capture every word that the novelist wrote -- the theatrical (cut) version was about 120 minutes.  On the film's commentary, everyone raves about McCarthy's script -- in fact, the script is poor, implausible, and very thin.  The characters are all cartoonish and the plot is rudimentary.  The long speeches with which McCarthy indulges himself occur at about 15 minute intervals and add nothing at all to the movie -- indeed, most of what is said in those speeches is either totally extraneous or, in the alternative, serves as an obtuse commentary on action that would be better shown and than described.

A lawyer, called simply "Counselor" (Michael Fassbender) has a beautiful girlfriend (Penelope Cruz) and seems to be prosperous.  The character has no depth -- he is a Luftmensch to use the Yiddish expression.  This attorney seems to have no office, very few, if any, current clients, and no obligations other than enriching himself by transactions with bad guys.  Counselor is completely implausible as a lawyer -- we have no idea about his practice -- and he seems to be an idiot too boot.  He's good in bed, however, as we see in a long and embarrassing sex scene with which the film begins -- it involves what the elderly Cormac McCarthy regards as post-modern pillow-talk (which also makes no sense) and simply compromises the two high-powered actors who have to thrash about in this scene.  Counselor is planning some sort of transaction with Reiner, a smarmy club owner in El Paso, played by Javier Bardem.  Bardem seems to have thought his part was unworkable and he makes fun of  it with his appearance -- he has a kind of frizzy hair that looks like a cartoon character who has suffered a high-voltage shock and he wears pink sunglasses.  (It's a ridiculous get-up and he looks like the old Little Rascals African-American child actor who plays Buckwheat.) Reiner's girlfriend is Cameron Diaz who slinks around in BDSM garments and keeps twin pet cheetahs -- the cheetahs are apparently pretty well trained because they sometimes sit regally in Reiner's night club.  This detail is like something imagined by a precocious 8th-grade boy and is indicative of the general level of most of the script -- the film's morality features bad guys who do garish bad things of the kind that an imaginative 8th-grader would find deplorable.  (Are there really "snuff films" in which teenage girls are beheaded and their twitching torso's ravaged by naked guys in executioner hoods?)  The movie is generally misogynistic (again an element of 8th grade boy morality) in that women use their sexuality to coerce men into doing bad things -- the world would be so much better if these nasty, sexy girls weren't always forcing us to sin.  Counselor goes to Amsterdam where he buys a beautiful diamond for his girlfriend and, later, asks her to marry him.  The Amsterdam scene features an encounter with a Sephardic Jewish diamond cutter played by the great Bruno Ganz -- there's a lot of totally unnecessary dialogue establishing that McCarthy has read Wikipedia about the diamond trade and some bizarre religious commentary about the "man of God" versus the Greek hero and Semitic (Jewish) culture being the last culture of any substance to exist on earth.  At times, the film slips into gloomy apocalyptic ravings -- the sins of the hero, which seem pretty minor to me, are somehow equated to world-wide greed and false values that McCarthy thinks will destroy the world.  (This is flat-out quack nonsense.) For some reason, Reiner who wants Counselor to invest in a new night club tries earnestly to talk him out of the deal -- he seems weirdly concerned about Counselor's naivety and innocence.  Needless to say, the deal is going to be financed with money provided by a Columbian drug cartel that ships its wares around the US in a huge "honey-wagon" filled with barrels of cocaine and human shit.  After Reiner tries to talk the dimwitted Counselor out of the deal, another drug dealer, played flamboyantly by Brad Pitt, also tells him to back out of the transaction.  But Counselor decides to make the play for the big one-time score with predictably dire consequences -- all the main characters suffer spectacular on-screen deaths.  (There are a couple of beheadings, some well-staged shoot-outs, and lots of running around desperately to avoid the assassins sent to murder all of the principals  in the film.  At one point, the hapless Penelope Cruz suggests that she and the hero hide in Boise, Idaho -- this amazes both the audience and Counselor who seems not to know where Boise is located, although he dutifully goes there.)

In the end, just about everyone is killed, the bad guys recover their cocaine, and Cameron Diaz playing the role of the evil, pan-sexual Malinka (she offers to have sex with Penelope Cruz and, in one memorable sequence, copulates with the windshield of a Ferrari) remarks to some character who I couldn't quite identify (a survivor bad guy I guess) that "the slaughter to come you can't even imagine", another of McCarthy's idiotic apocalyptic ravings.

Despite its folly, the movie is very entertaining and its fun to see big Hollywood actors wrestling with material that obviously completely baffles them -- Brad Pitt as the horn-dog drug dealer is pretty funny and Bardem is hilarious throughout the whole movie.  (He seems to relish to stupid lines that he has to read and, when he describes how his girlfriend "fucked" the windshield of his car, with visual to illustrate, his eyes bug out and he acts truly traumatize; he literally cowers as Malinka wipes her vagina all over his windshield, half-covering his bulging eyes, but too obsessed to look away -- it's laugh-out loud funny.  (The episdoe traumatizes Reiner Although not traumatized enough to end his relationship with this evil femme fatale ; in light of recent events, its impossible to see the wicked Malinka as anyone other than the snow-white Malania Trump.)  Just before the climax, Counselor calls the head mafia guy predictably called Jefe, played by the redoubtable Ruben Blades, and gets an earful of gibberish from the crime boss including statements about human destiny at the crossroads, the transcendence and duty of suffering, and the fate of the world.  It's all pretty great if viewed in the proper mood.  A scene in which Cameron Diaz tries to confess her polysexual adventures (she's not Catholic and doesn't know if she was even baptized) to a poor priest is also priceless -- ultimately, the miserable priest has to flee his own confession booth to the dismay of the nice Mexican ladies waiting in line for his services.  The sequence in which Brad Pitt loses all the fingers on one hand and his head to a ridiculous garroting automaton is really funny, particularly the way in which the astonished cops put the actor's head on top of his crotch to carry him away.  It's not a serious movie and once  you figure out that the film's pleasures will all be guilty ones -- it's just a well-made, interestingly acted B neo-film-noir --  the proceedings are, in fact, pretty amusing.  Nothing in the movie is even remotely plausible and, as I watched the film, I wondered about the Euro-trash night-clubs and elaborate restaurants and palatial mansions in El Paso where the movie is set.  Remarkably,it turns out no one went to El Paso to make this movie -- why would a film crew suffer for eight or nine weeks in a backwater of that kind? Amazingly, London is used for El Paso, hence, the utter, overt inaccuracy of the city scenes.  The landscapes look pretty plausible for West Texas.  But those scenes were shot in a National Park in Spain, the same place where spaghetti Westerns were once made.