10.28.2013

'The Counselor' with Grim Advisements


by Brett Parker

The Counselor marks the first original Hollywood screenplay from famed novelist Cormac McCarthy, and if you were expecting something on par with his celebrated novels Blood Meridian or The Road, then you can be considered more optimistic than most.  From where I sit, the final result plays more like a watered-down and glamorized No Country for Old Men.  Yet on a pure entertainment level, the film makes us realize that snappy noirs don’t exactly grow on trees these days and we’re grateful to have Ridley Scott’s expert sizzle to guide us through this wild ride.

The film follows a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) known only as “The Counselor” (after all, this is a Cormac McCarthy character).  While he appears to have the perfect upscale life with a beautiful fiance (Penelope Cruz), he claims his “back’s up against the wall” with financial matters and decides to to go in on a drug deal with his shady business pal, Reiner (Javier Bardem).  Their plot revolves around distributing a shipment of drugs to be transported across the Mexico-Texas border in a sewage truck.  Even though a shady operator named Westray (Brad Pitt) warns him about all the brutal ways such a deal could go wrong, The Counselor still decides to go all-in with the plan.


Thanks to unforeseen violent dealings and catastrophic coincidences, everything with the drug shipment goes spectacularly wrong and The Counselor quickly gets a target on his back.  Reiner has no helpful advice for him and Westray advises him to run very far away, but The Counselor is terrified that cartels will get to his fiance before anything.  So a race beings to save his beloved, and himself, as it becomes painfully obvious that blood is about to be spilled.

No one will ever really accuse The Counselor of being one of McCarthy’s masterworks, yet the film itself brings back fond memories of a time when even the most generic of noirs dished out endless riches of crackerjack dialogue and colorful character bits.  Of course, all of this is basked in McCarthy’s bleak view of humanity, recalling No Country for Old Men’s ideas on the corrupting nature of greed and how magnificently unforgiving the drug world can be.  Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the script is its paranoid misogyny streak which would be pretty appalling if the philosophical style it’s presented in didn’t make us ponder that even cavemen and savages have feelings, too.  Besides, such feelings cumulate with the insanely startling scene where Cameron Diaz, as Reiner’s cold-hearted girlfriend, has sex with a Ferrari, so help me God.  Diaz’s acrobatics, McCarthy’s hilarious description of the act, Bardem’s facial reaction to witnessing it, and the aquatic metaphor used to describe such a things all help to instantly place the whole shebang in the pantheon of unforgettable sex scenes, for better or worse.  

Even if this is all Cormac McCarthy going through his familiar motions, it gets more verve thanks to Ridley Scott going through his motions.  His taste for glowing, gorgeous landscapes paint not the lived-in southern landscape of No Country for Old Men but an upscale, glamorous one that strongly exudes the greedy hollowness that holds a giant grip on this world.  While Scott tends to dab in varying genres, the one unifying thing in all his work is the bruising humanity that tends to rear its head in environments of immoral hysteria.  And it’s that very sneaky humanity that helps make McCarthy’s grim worldview more wrenching here than it’s been in past adaptations of his work.  This is greatly exemplified in a sensationally crushing scene where The Counselor disintegrates once he is elegantly told by a cartel official (Ruben Blades) about the true nature of grief and suffering.

Of course, Scott also holds a knack for allowing expert actors to show off some lively grit.  Michael Fassbender certainly has the movie star goods (a scene in which he gazes upon a poster of Steve McQueen damn near halts the film with its blatant allusions), and he wrings all the anguish he can from an underwritten role (for all his actions, we never truly do understand The Counselor’s financial desperation or desire to walk on the wild side).  Cameron Diaz pools all her resources to nicely exude icy blonde calculation, which certainly gets the workout of its life in the Ferrari scene.  Javier Bardem is a laugh riot as a flamboyant entrepreneur who hilariously cares more about satisfying his girlfriend than he does about the fact that he could potentially die at any moment.  Brad Pitt uses his curated coolness to wonderful effect as a man who’s seen it all, and his final scene will surely stay etched in your nightmares forever.  And Penelope Cruz may be pure window decoration here, but she’s easily convincing as the only virtuous person in sight.

Since we’re in Cormac McCarthy territory, you can be sure that The Counselor has a merciless and depressing ending that holds no sympathy for narrative conventions or audience comfort.  We may have reached the point where such business has become cliche for McCarthy, but his cliches still shatter most normal storytelling cliches.  It’s those very bleak and unconventional traits that make The Counselor a haunting and exciting affair, and it proves to be rather hard to shake.  The dialogue will inspire much laughter and alarm while the narrative treats us to a sex scene and a death scene we’ll never forget.  While it may not be transcendent, its greatest achievement is to show us how most Hollywood musings about the drug world just might be pure fantasy and drivel.  

10.11.2013

The Nail-Biting Perils of Being 'Captain'


by Brett Parker

I remember that day in 2009 when America was glued to the startling suspense in the ordeal of Captain Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain who was being held hostage by Somali pirates on a lifeboat in the ocean.  All the media outlets were hanging onto every bit of the unfolding drama until Navy SEALS intervened with awe-inspiring expertise to end the ordeal.  After feeling horrifying sympathy for Phillips, beaming pride in our navy, and great sadness over the awful circumstances that cause Somali piracy, the cinephile in me couldn’t help but ponder that this would all make for an exciting movie one day.

And so it has.  Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum) has taken his knack for wringing kinetic cinematic danger from real world events and applied it to Captain Phillip’s tale, turning it into a gripping thriller.  But nothing here feels terribly boasted or “Hollywood-ized.”  Greengrass appears to stick to the factual details of the horrible event, and that proves to contain all the high-wattage tension needed to give this film juice.  It also provides a lead role for Tom Hanks, who hasn’t had an interesting part in ages, that lets him shine with true grit.

On April 8th, 2009, the Maersk Alabama finds itself in dangerous waters as it ships 17,000 metric tons of cargo en route to Mombassa, Kenya.  Four Somali pirates, all between the ages of 17-19, board the ship with AK-47s.  The pirates’ leader, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), points a gun at Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) and starts demanding money or the crew will be killed.  Thanks to training on how to handle piracy situations, the crew knows enough to shut down the ship in its place and hide in the cargo room.  Thanks to quick-thinking, knowledge of the ship, and the crew overpowering one of the pirates, Captain Phillips is able to convince the Somalians to leave the ship with $30,000 from the safe.  But those circumstances turn out not to please the pirates, for they take Phillips with them on the ship’s lifeboat as collateral for more ransom.  


Thus begins a hostage situation in which Phillips is trapped on a 28-foot lifeboat with armed gunmen who plan on taking him back to Somalia and negotiate a million-dollar ransom for his release.  The U.S. Navy gets word of his capture and send in destroyer ships and Navy SEALS to try and rescue him.  As the pirates try to outthink the Navy to get what they want, Phillips tries his very best to talk some sense into Muse, who holds a hardheaded refusal to give up quietly.  It soon becomes clear that if the pirates don’t surrender, the Navy will have to hurt these young men, or Phillips himself will end up killed.

Like Kathryn Bigelow, Greengrass likes to take deadly situations and strip them down to as much bare-bones realism as possible.  Yet instead of focusing on heavy-handed dialogue and overly-done action, he likes to stay grounded in the character’s behavior and reactions to touch on bigger ideas.  Captain Phillips doesn’t betray this technique, for Greengrass keeps his shaky-cam tightly focused on the claustrophobic intensity of the situation for maximum effect.  This is especially felt in the battle of wills between Phillips and Muse, for the tension works a vice-grip on you once you realize these two leaders actually have lots in common: self-reliant resourcefulness, a strict adherence to duty, a clear-eyed view of the bigger picture, etc.  Since explosive violence feels like the impending result, their chess match keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time.

The real-life Captain Phillips has expressed repeatedly how he’s no Superman, but just an Average Joe who did the job required of him.  Well Tom Hanks was born and bred to play resourceful everymen, and this is his first truly dynamite role in quite some time.  Ron Howard once noted how Hanks is a star that audiences love to watch while he thinks, and that ideal gets the workout of its life here, for Phillips really only has the experience and intelligence in his head as a defense and it’s exciting to watch his steely calculation even as his body language suggests a man mortified to his core.  The other ace performance comes from Barkhad Abdi, who makes Muse just as “professional” as Phillips while suggesting an inner-ocean of weariness the Captain can only hint at.  Instead of relying on cackling evil or reckless hysteria to get his effect, Abdi wisely illuminates an acute perseverance that must be followed to combat the dire circumstances of his home country.  If the dialogue doesn’t exactly fill in the harrowing circumstances that forced these Somalians into piracy, Abdi’s performance says it all.

Even though the current-events checker in us knows exactly how this true life story ended, the film’s final act still turns out to be as riveting as high-seas adventures get.  The mounting tensions, the erupting violence, the suggestions of death, and the Navy’s race to find a solution all create a whirlwind of intensity that will almost leave you feeling just as spent and shaken as Phillips feels in his devastating final scene.  Even though another director would’ve treated us to more poetic flourishes and philosophical muses, we realize that Greengrass’s tight and frantic busywork did all it needed to do to spell out the enormous power of the United States’ grasp and the monumental desperation that caused the Somalians to take them on with wrongheaded hostility.  It’s rare to find an adventure so thrilling, so true-to-life, and so packed with ideological melancholy, which is why Captain Phillips isn’t a movie to treat lightly at all.