'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.