The Counselor should have been great. It’s hard not to get excited about the prospect of Ridley Scott taking the helm of Cormac McCarthy’s first original screenplay, directing a cast stacked with the likes of Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt. It’s one of those films you really expect to enjoy, only to come away wondering how it’s possible for so much talent to be squandered in so little time.
The film is about 10 percent plot and 90 percent overwrought dialogue, giving rise to a scrum of potentially interesting characters who are ultimately given nothing to do. And then there’s Cameron Diaz, whose over-acted turn as a hypersexual cheetah fetishist is yet another sad chapter in her long résumé of poor performances.
Fassbender stars as the nameless Counselor, a criminal defense attorney whose clients are players in the Mexican drug trade. Blinded by his love for his fiancée (Penélope Cruz) and his desire to express that love in the form of a gigantic diamond, the Counselor agrees to act as the middleman in a convoluted scheme that involves shipping $20 million in cocaine from Mexico to Chicago. (The details of the plan are never made explicit, so we’re mostly left to guess about each character’s role in the arrangement.)
Bardem does his best to outshine the material as Reiner, the Counselor’s liaison to the Juarez underbelly and one of many characters who try in vain to warn the hero it’s never a good idea to get in bed with Mexican drug lords, even if it’s just a “one-time deal.” Pitt’s Westray is another slick operator who likes to spice up his criminal dealings with pop-culture references and clever turns of phrase.
Original screenplay notwithstanding, the film feels like an adaptation of one of McCarthy’s novels, and it falls into the same trap that many adaptations have before it: It tries to squeeze the prose for all its worth in fear of wasting a single drop of the artistry that went into crafting it. This comes at the expense of plot momentum and coherent pacing, which quickly devolve into afterthoughts.
Scott chooses to have several key plot developments unfold off screen, opting instead to half-explain them later within lengthy soliloquies. And despite spending so much time talking, the characters are devoid of any kind of background stories that might have added some much-needed contextual flavor to their ramblings.
It would have been easier to identify with the Counselor (or at least understand his intentions) if McCarthy had provided a better taste of the character’s past — a glimpse of some of his shadier clients and the extent to which he’s aware of what they’re capable of. Only then would we really know how much he realized he was putting on the line by inserting himself into that world.
I get what McCarthy was going for. He clearly has a love for his characters and wants us to feel the same affection by watching them engage each other in intimate repartee. We’re supposed to get to know them by sitting in on these improbably witty exchanges in which gangsters name-drop their favorite poets and Mickey Rourke films. (Drug lords — they’re just like us!)
Which is fine, I guess. And there are moments in the film when this actually works, particularly in smaller scenes that allow the characters to flex their personalities (but still don’t really move the plot forward). As usual, Bardem is best suited for that job, most notably in a scene in which he goes into gory detail in relating an anecdote about Diaz’s character getting intimate with a Ferrari. But overall, too much is mired in innuendo, and the viewers are tasked with filling in all the gaps themselves.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not opposed to doing a little bit of work to pull out the subtext. Heavy-handed flashbacks and other lazy shortcuts are poor substitutes for smarter, subtler storytelling. And it’s healthy to ask the audience to use its imagination every now and then.
But throw a guy a bone here. It’s important to keep in mind that film is a visual medium, and there’s a certain threshold where a movie starts to drown in its own dialogue.
In some sense, Ridley Scott has made a career out of toeing that line. He’s the master of slow-burning story arcs that build suspense through a series of quieter moments — Alien, Blade Runner, etc. But what makes those films great is their nuanced but authentic character development — we get to see Ripley and Deckard evolve in meaningful ways as they confront the hostile forces surrounding them. They don’t just talk (and talk and talk) about the cold realities of existence; they take matters into their own hands and fight battles they’re most likely going to lose.
The Counselor — both the character and the film — ultimately fail to do this.
— Rob Heidrick
The film is about 10 percent plot and 90 percent overwrought dialogue, giving rise to a scrum of potentially interesting characters who are ultimately given nothing to do. And then there’s Cameron Diaz, whose over-acted turn as a hypersexual cheetah fetishist is yet another sad chapter in her long résumé of poor performances.
Fassbender stars as the nameless Counselor, a criminal defense attorney whose clients are players in the Mexican drug trade. Blinded by his love for his fiancée (Penélope Cruz) and his desire to express that love in the form of a gigantic diamond, the Counselor agrees to act as the middleman in a convoluted scheme that involves shipping $20 million in cocaine from Mexico to Chicago. (The details of the plan are never made explicit, so we’re mostly left to guess about each character’s role in the arrangement.)
Bardem does his best to outshine the material as Reiner, the Counselor’s liaison to the Juarez underbelly and one of many characters who try in vain to warn the hero it’s never a good idea to get in bed with Mexican drug lords, even if it’s just a “one-time deal.” Pitt’s Westray is another slick operator who likes to spice up his criminal dealings with pop-culture references and clever turns of phrase.
Original screenplay notwithstanding, the film feels like an adaptation of one of McCarthy’s novels, and it falls into the same trap that many adaptations have before it: It tries to squeeze the prose for all its worth in fear of wasting a single drop of the artistry that went into crafting it. This comes at the expense of plot momentum and coherent pacing, which quickly devolve into afterthoughts.
Scott chooses to have several key plot developments unfold off screen, opting instead to half-explain them later within lengthy soliloquies. And despite spending so much time talking, the characters are devoid of any kind of background stories that might have added some much-needed contextual flavor to their ramblings.
It would have been easier to identify with the Counselor (or at least understand his intentions) if McCarthy had provided a better taste of the character’s past — a glimpse of some of his shadier clients and the extent to which he’s aware of what they’re capable of. Only then would we really know how much he realized he was putting on the line by inserting himself into that world.
I get what McCarthy was going for. He clearly has a love for his characters and wants us to feel the same affection by watching them engage each other in intimate repartee. We’re supposed to get to know them by sitting in on these improbably witty exchanges in which gangsters name-drop their favorite poets and Mickey Rourke films. (Drug lords — they’re just like us!)
Which is fine, I guess. And there are moments in the film when this actually works, particularly in smaller scenes that allow the characters to flex their personalities (but still don’t really move the plot forward). As usual, Bardem is best suited for that job, most notably in a scene in which he goes into gory detail in relating an anecdote about Diaz’s character getting intimate with a Ferrari. But overall, too much is mired in innuendo, and the viewers are tasked with filling in all the gaps themselves.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not opposed to doing a little bit of work to pull out the subtext. Heavy-handed flashbacks and other lazy shortcuts are poor substitutes for smarter, subtler storytelling. And it’s healthy to ask the audience to use its imagination every now and then.
But throw a guy a bone here. It’s important to keep in mind that film is a visual medium, and there’s a certain threshold where a movie starts to drown in its own dialogue.
In some sense, Ridley Scott has made a career out of toeing that line. He’s the master of slow-burning story arcs that build suspense through a series of quieter moments — Alien, Blade Runner, etc. But what makes those films great is their nuanced but authentic character development — we get to see Ripley and Deckard evolve in meaningful ways as they confront the hostile forces surrounding them. They don’t just talk (and talk and talk) about the cold realities of existence; they take matters into their own hands and fight battles they’re most likely going to lose.
The Counselor — both the character and the film — ultimately fail to do this.
— Rob Heidrick
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