Director Report Card: Ridley Scott (2013)

21. The Counselor

In early 2012, Cormac McCarthy – probably the most respected English language novelist currently alive – announced he had sold his first original screenplay, to the same producers who had made the film version of “The Road” some years prior. Ridley Scott, who once tried to make McCarthy's notoriously unfilmable “Blood Meridian” into a movie, quickly became attached to direct. On paper, it should've been one of the most exciting movies of the year. Here, you had an unquestionably great writer paired with a director who, no matter how workman-like some of his lesser films have been, is certainly an established master of the medium by this point. “The Counselor” would not live up to this hype. In fact, the movie was met with baffled confusion and outright disdain from most critical corners. Is “The Counselor” as much of a misfire as many claim? Or is it, like a handful of defenders have noted, secretly a masterpiece?

The titular counselor is very in-love with his girlfriend, Laura, and successful enough to do things like buy her an exquisite diamond engagement ring. This is when he decides to partner with his friend, Reiner, on a drug deal. He soon meets with Westray, a man with connections to the Mexican drug cartels, who warns him about how dangerous the cartels are. That they don't just sell drugs but make snuff films as well. Unbeknownst to any of the men, Reiner's sexually ravenous girlfriend Malkina is plotting to betray all of them. She hires a man to steal the drug shipment, which soon brings the cartel's fury down on the counselor and all his partners.

Having now watched it for the first time, I would agree with the consensus that “The Counselor” is a puzzling motion picture. It's full of explicit imagery, doesn't have much forward-momentum in its plotting, and has characters that function more like concepts than people. As far as I can tell, the project was an attempt by Cormac McCarthy to write a film noir. You can see this in its story of a seemingly good man getting in over his head with a criminal enterprise. It's also evident in its depiction of women, who are either angelically pure – though decidedly not chaste – wives or treacherous female predators. This connection is also clear in what little story the film has, which burns through a number of side characters and set-ups on its way to a nihilistic denouncement. 

If McCarthy was trying to put his spin on a recognizable movie genre, it was without altering his literary writing style. McCarthy's books are, frequently, low on plot and high on characters having philosophical discussions. This deeply non-cinematic format is maintained for “The Counselor.” Truthfully, almost the entire movie is devoted to people sharing meandering stories. Many of these have little to nothing to do with the actual plot, as characters share anecdotes about sexual adventures or digress from diamonds to Judaism. This is a movie that devotes its climax to a cartel boss quoting poetry in the middle of a long-winded monologue, essentially chastising the protagonist for his poor choices. 

Among the reams of dialogue the actors were given to perform in “The Counselor,” a few reoccurring ideas emerge. Characters talk about the sexual joy they got from watching their pet cheetahs eat rabbits, because they themselves are predators. The depravity of evil, which manifest in stories of girls being kidnapped to star in snuff movies or deviant sexuality, is brought up. The nature of sin and punishment is also mentioned, when trolling a priest or during that climatic soliloquy about comeuppance. This is a movie full of high-minded themes and it's utterly enamored of them. To the point where, instead of letting these ideas breath freely within a compelling plot or in characters with depth, they're just discussed plainly.

Yet “The Counselor” refusal to function like an actual movie, instead of a series of paragraphs, is not what makes it truly baffling. Instead, the script's obsession with sex is its most puzzling aspect. This is a motion picture that begins with Michael Fassbender complimenting Penelope Cruz on her genitalia before roughly fingering her. There's much talk of lesbian encounters, cunnilingus, pornography, and discharge. Of course, the movie's most notorious moment is an explicit sequence of Cameron Diaz pleasuring herself on a sports car's windshield. In execution, the movie feels like Ridley Scott's very late, deeply miscalculated entry into the erotic thriller genre. As previously noted, Scott is a director that sometimes struggles with romance, much less eroticism. All the frank sex talk and gymnastic masturbation comes off as hideously uncomfortable and awkward, for the viewer and the performers on-screen. 

Despite all its talk of sex, “The Counselor” is a deeply un-sexy movie. It manages to make the idea of finger-banging Penelope Cruz seem unappealing. That's because the explicit content and its pretentious philosophy do not mesh well at all. Diaz trying to seduce Cruz, while both are only wearing a towel, comes off as sweaty because the scene is focusing so much on Diaz' cheetah tattoos. Cause, ya see, she's hungry for flesh, like a wild animal. If you didn't get the point, several actual cheetahs wander in and out of the film, sometimes literally. Once again, the movie is so eager to draw attention to its own ideas, that it ends up more on the side of camp than anything else. Whether this was intentional or not – Javier Bardem reacts to the automobile sex with the same bewilderment as the viewer – is hard to say, because everything else about the movie is so deathly self-serious.

Another thing that McCarthy can get away with on the page but that really doesn't work in a movie is an utterly passive protagonist. Michael Fassbender's titular character is such a non-entity that he doesn't even have a name. Why he wants to be involved in the drug business is never specified. Things happen around the Counselor, not to him. People talk at him, instead of having conversations with him. He never interacts with the film's antagonist and most of the plot-relevant events are happening far away from where he is. If you removed the Counselor from the movie bearing his name, most of the events in the story would still happen. He also only counsels somebody in one scene, making you wonder why his job is so highlighted. The character, and the movie named after him, could have just as easily been called The Buyer. Or The Guy, for that matter.

And that reveals probably the biggest problem with “The Counselor:” You do not care about any of these characters. Because they're never fleshed-out in any meaningful way. Bardem's Reiner sure has a lot of crazy stories to tell but that just makes him come off as a collection of quirks, not an actual personality. He's kind of annoying, truthfully. We are never offered any insight into Fassbender's actions, the man just growing more desperate as this trap closes in around him. Most damningly, the film's love story is totally inert. Why does the counselor love his girlfriend, beyond her attractive genitalia? Why does she like him, beyond the good sex? The entire last act of the movie resolves around this relationship being destroy. Why are we suppose to give a shit, when none of these characters feel like real people?

Are we, perhaps, not suppose to care about these characters? Is the entire movie, in fact, nothing but a stylistic exercise? A delivery system for McCarthy's rambling monologues and precise turns-of-phrase? If this is the case, watching and listening to “The Counselor's” many, long dialogues scenes is not very interesting. That's because the actors clearly have no idea what to do with the material. Javier Bardem hams it up as his excessively sleazy character but, the minute the character ceases vamping campily, Bardem flounders. Michael Fassbender tries to invest some warmth or humanity into the character's loving or panicking scenes because there's nothing else to latch on to. Ruben Blades, as the drug lord, delivers McCarthy's speeches in such a sleepy manner, he might as well be reading from a phone book. Only Brad Pitt, as Westray, seems to grasp the kind of grizzled panache necessary to bring such thick prose to life.

If the movie's men seem uncertain how to handle their vague characters and the endless talking, the women have it even harder. Penelope Cruz to given nothing to work with, the character existing as nothing but an idealized object for the protagonist to worry about. Cameron Diaz, as Bardem's evil girlfriend, gets it the worst. The character is so cartoonishly evil, engineering everyone's destruction simply because it amuses her, that Diaz can do nothing but overact in response. This is combined with Diaz' clear inability to get around McCarthy's baroque dialogue. The result is a performance that is simultaneously ghoulish and stilted. Diaz retired four years later and I can't help but feel her apocalyptically bad acting here was a contributing factor. (For what it's worth, Rosie Perez, in her sole scene, clearly is able to work with McCarthy's stylized dialogue. Her's is one of the few bright spots in the film.)

I think I've made it clear that, if anyone is the auteur of “The Counselor,” it's McCarthy. His authorial voice overwhelms almost everything about this motion picture. But you can still tell that Ridley Scott directed this movie. Mostly because of the violence. Bloody acts of violence are exclamation points all throughout “The Counselor.” People get blown away by machine guns, black blood bursting from their bodies. The shoot-outs and explosions are done in that sharply edited way that is familiar to long-time Scott fans by now. Decapitations are repeatedly referenced in the film, surely as foreshadowing for their on-screen depictions. A climatic beheading results in a crimson arc of arterial spray. Ridley Scott simply loves ribbons of blood flying through the air. It's cinematic as fuck, which helps in a movie as endlessly talky as this one. 

Ultimately, “The Counselor” is a motion picture that ignores most of the rules narrative filmmaking is suppose to follow. And not in a way that's challenging or interesting – as the movie's small cult of proponents claim – but that's just kind of annoying. In fact, I'm halfway convinced the entire project was an elaborate prank on McCarthy's behalf, a 25 million dollar slab of anti-comedy. That would certainly explain scenes like a drug runner regaling a random woman with his dog food diet, a joke excised from the theatrical cut but included in the extended version. (Because, yes, of course, there's an extended version.) A series of dense monologues broken up by grotesque sex or cartoonish violence, “The Counselor” ends up feeling like a self-indulgent shaggy dog story. Yet it's still better than “A Good Year,” if only because baffling excess and terminally up-its-own-ass pretensions are more interesting than clichés and bad comedy. [Grade: C-]