When maneuvering around the wilderness of the movie business,
most films stick to the trails listed on cinema’s well-worn map. An adventurous
few strike their own path through the brush and trees. And then there’s The Counselor, which tears up the map,
kicks over the trailhead signs and lights the forest on fire.
This is maddening outsider art. A carpet bombing of philosophy
and metaphor. A hysterical spasm of death and excess. Not in many, many years
has a movie been so equally beautiful and ugly, loud and silent, profound and
pointless, rewarding and frustrating, brilliant and deviant. It exists in a
paradox of ideas and images, both of which will startle and confuse you to no
end.
When I left the theater I knew I had seen something uniquely
disappointing, or maybe just disappointingly unique. The Counselor was taunting me, humiliating me with its bizarre-o
world of crime and sorrow. It had consumed me and spat me back out, and now I
wasn’t sure how to react to all of it. Part of me wanted to claw at the
screen, but another part was deeply moved by the film’s one-of-a-kind tone and
tempo, and its reverent meditation on themes of sacrifice and choice. Now that
it’s settled a little, and I’ve picked up the pieces, I can admit that I love
this terrible movie and all its puzzling intricacies. I can’t promise you’ll have
the same experience; honestly, you’re likely to hate it. It will be one of the
most polarizing films of the year.
The movie, directed by cinema great Ridley Scott and written by
literary great Cormac McCarthy, stars Michael Fassbender as a nameless attorney
in Dallas . If
he has a name, I didn’t hear it; everyone calls him Counselor. He represents
several seedy kingpins, including the enigmatic Reiner (Javier Bardem), who has
his hands in all kinds of criminal endeavors. Reiner's style is kingpin couture: blue pants, a silk shirt with butterfly specimens woven into it and this wild anime-style haircut. Early in the film, the Counselor — his clothing is butterfly-free — is
offered a buy-in on a drug trafficking deal that turns very bad very quickly.
As the Counselor attempts to fix the deal, he finds himself more
entangled in the details as the body count leaps upward. Much of the plot
revolves around a steaming shit-filled septic truck full of drugs, which changes hands so
many times that I was confused as to who was winning and who was losing. Certainly
the Counselor is forever losing in the film that bears his name, as is his
sweet girlfriend (Penélope Cruz). Everyone else, though — including Bardem’s
spiky-haired Reiner, Brad Pitt’s honky-tonkin’ Texan and Cameron Diaz’s
murderous Ellen Barkin impersonation, Malkina — seems to have better fortunes,
until they don’t.
Lots of other business transpires in the movie, including a
rather uncomfortable Catholic confession, a wire strung up across a roadway for
a motorcyclist, two cheetahs in supporting roles and a scene so outrageous, so
inexplicably wacky, so perversely written that it can’t be repeated even in the
most free-wheeling company. If the scene were to be titled, it would be called
“Catfish.” And even that’s giving away too much. There's also a joke so hilarious that I laughed harder at it then I have at any other full comedy this year. The punchline, which I'm going to give you, is: "But then you'll still owe me three-eighty." It comes so unexpectedly, it's as if a catapult launched it through the wall from the adjacent theater.
The “Catfish” sequence takes place in a Dallas bar filled with pictures of actor
Steve McQueen, and even a replica of the German motorcycle he rode in The Great Escape. The bar is one of many
memorable interior locations where the characters sponge up and ring out
McCarthy’s sumptuous wordplay. Other locations include elegant restaurants,
modernist concrete mansions, vaulted cathedral-like hotel lobbies and outdoor
lounges with arrays of interconnected parasols. The locations are wonderful,
and the way they’re filmed suggests that Scott and his cinematographer Dariusz
Wolski had a lot of fun framing their actors with them.
Now, I’ve told you about the plot, but I’ve only really scratched
the surface on this cinematic wonder-blunder. Although there is much action and
violence, a large portion of the movie takes place in the dialogue. Most of it
is given as monologues, sometimes by characters we only see once. These
performances are amazing. One by Ruben Blades is a showstopper; another by
Bruno Ganz (Hitler in Downfall) is
beautiful and heartfelt. All the characters get big speeches, including Brad
Pitt, who’s only a minor player in the film’s plot.
What’s interesting about these speeches is that they’re all
spoken in metaphor. And not metaphors in bits and pieces of The Counselor; no, the entire
movie. A scene of a man picking out a diamond for an engagement ring has
nothing to do with diamonds. Scenes of sexual confrontation have nothing to do
sex. Discussions involving snuff films, crossroads, cheetahs, catfish, bolo
neckties … they all are deeper, more existential conversations about the people
having them. Remember in No Country For Old Men, when Bardem's killer character ate peanuts and flipped quarters — metaphors for more sinister things to come — with the yokel at the gas station? Now imagine a whole movie of scenes like that, and you'll be closer to The Counselor than you realize.
McCarthy’s dialogue, so effortlessly gentle in The Road, can be poetic and somber in The Counselor, but it can also be
infuriating because it skirts around the obvious action happening in the movie.
I just wanted someone to address the drugs and the septic truck, but instead we
get lots of esoteric verbal wanderings about life, love and death. For example,
here’s Pitt: “I think that if you ransacked the archives of the redeemed, you
would uncover tales of moral squalor quite beyond the merely appalling.” Or
this one: “You are the world you have created.” Here’s another: “The truth
about women is you can do anything to women but bore them.” These lines are
great, but they serve the screenwriter, not the movie’s plot or the audience
watching it all unfold.
These philosophical meanderings give the film a deeper, more
robust flavor, but they will turn off most viewers. Especially those who came
thinking they were watching a crime thriller. In reality, The Counselor has more in common with Alejandro Jodorowsky and his
avant-garde surrealist fever dream Holy
Mountain than it does with a modern-day crime thriller, be it as mundane
as this year’s absent-minded 2 Guns
or as profound as Pulp Fiction. The Counselor is abstractly worded and absurd, and
that won’t sit well with audiences who wanted gun violence and a hero riding into the sunset.
Mostly though, it’s just too highbrow and wordy for its own good.
While I appreciated its philosophical implications, the film made
my head spin at times, especially in the devastating final act. And as
wonderful as all the monologues were, they left vast portions of the
plot untouched. As for the performances, they're great, but since the film’s so hard to
follow, the performances tend to get lost in all the dialogue. Ridley Scott is
a phenomenal director, and Cormac McCarthy is a literary treasure, but I think
they know something that we don’t about the movie. And they forgot to film it
for our benefit.
And people thought Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of McCarthy’s
No Country For Old Men had an
ambiguous ending — just you wait for the last scene here. There's likely to be a riot all the way back to the box office, assuming there's enough people in the theater with you to even start a riot. A hushed stampede might be more appropriate for groups of 50 or less.
In any case, The Counselor
is a maddeningly cryptic film. If it ends up a cult classic on a midnight movie
spree, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Nor would I be surprised if someone develops an illegal drug that enhances the plot. There's an endorsement: "The Counselor ... works well with drugs."
