The Counsellor | Little White Lies

The Coun­sel­lor

06 Mar 2013 / Released: 06 Nov 2013

A man in a suit stands among a crowd of people holding protest signs in an indoor setting.
A man in a suit stands among a crowd of people holding protest signs in an indoor setting.
4

Anticipation.

Even taking into account the growing rumbles that it’s a jewel-encrusted turkey, we’d be foolish to not give this cast and crew every chance possible.

2

Enjoyment.

Confused, confusing and thoroughly unsatisfying. Doesn’t even have the good grace to be truly laughable.

2

In Retrospect.

Scott tries manfully to capture some of that taught, dusty No Country… vibe, but, in doing so, takes his eye off the matter at hand.

Rid­ley Scott direct­ing. Cor­mac McCarthy writ­ing. Michael Fass­ben­der star­ring. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

The Coun­sel­lor is a sinewy joint of dusty Tex-Mex fatal­ism from the for­mi­da­ble pen of Cor­mac McCarthy. It looks impas­sive­ly on as a hand­some ama­teur is swept out of his depth after a big-time drug deal goes fatal­ly south. It boasts scads of major-league off-screen action, some dev­il­ish­ly weaponised farm­yard machin­ery, a lacon­ic, cow­boy-hat­ted wise-owl pick­ing over the human wreck­age and a chill­ing­ly ludi­crous turn from Javier Bar­dem in a loopy fright wig. In fact, The Coun­sel­lor bears so many out­ward sim­i­lar­i­ties to the Coen broth­ers’ mas­ter­ly, Oscar-win­ning adap­ta­tion of No Coun­try for Old Men that it’s not ini­tial­ly obvi­ous where exact­ly it could go at all wrong.

The immac­u­late cast — which includes Michael Fass­ben­der, Pené­lope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bar­dem and Brad Pitt along­side a slew of showy cameos — is bul­let­proof. Dar­iusz Wolski’s pho­tog­ra­phy con­jures up a febrile syn­the­sis of dog­patch dilap­i­da­tion and nar­cot­ic allure, and Daniel Pem­ber­ton (erst­while com­pos­er of the theme from Peep Show!) twangs at all the right places on the dis­cor­dant sound­track. So why is The Coun­sel­lor such an inert, dispir­it­ing, detached, dis­joint­ed, coun­ter­feit and clum­sy film?

It would be unfair to lev­el blame for all and every one of The Counsellor’s many and griev­ous short­com­ings at direc­tor Rid­ley Scott. Extreme­ly tempt­ing, but unfair. He is work­ing from an orig­i­nal script (from McCarthy — his first) that is not only under­nour­ished and lack­ing in focus but also abstruse to the point of being quarrelsome.

Yet Scott is an indus­try titan, not a new­bie to be cowed by a big-name screen­writer. It is ulti­mate­ly his hand at the tiller even before the cam­eras start rolling, not just after. The Coun­sel­lor — much like last year’s nar­ra­tive­ly lack­adaisi­cal Prometheus — works from a script that clear­ly needs be bro­ken down and rebuilt from the ground up in order to func­tion. Did, per­haps, McCarthy’s fear­some lit­er­ary pedi­gree so impress Scott that he looked past the script’s flaws and called action on what is, at heart, a pile-up of hokey, deriv­a­tive trash that doesn’t even work on a rub­ber­neck­ing level?

The plot fan­cies itself as being ellip­ti­cal and con­vo­lut­ed, but boiled right down it’s the sim­ple immoral­i­ty tale of a swanky El Paso lawyer (Fass­ben­der) going in on a one-time drug deal with his flam­boy­ant club-own­er client (Bar­dem) and falling almost imme­di­ate prey to the vio­lent cos­mic tur­bu­lence, oblique brim­stone rhetoric and ungovern­able furies that hold eter­nal sway over McCarthy’s unfor­giv­ing universe.

Padding comes from a host of fan­ci­ful, pulpy adorn­ments that could have been sprung from an overex­cit­ed adolescent’s best-ever wet-dream: snuff movies, point­less­ly elab­o­rate tor­ture devices, schem­ing blonde sexbombs, hip hotels, exot­ic plunge­pools, cool cars, behead­ings, strip-clubs and Japan­ese super­bikes. There are even — pure­ly for a thun­der­ing alle­go­ry on the immutable nature of man — a cou­ple of leop­ards mooching in the backdrop.

McCarthy’s real­i­ty is delib­er­ate­ly height­ened, but Scott’s attempts to cleave to the com­mon­place — basic com­po­si­tions, bland, every­day envi­ron­ments, inter­minable phone con­ver­sa­tions — strands the char­ac­ters between stools. The result is nei­ther use nor orna­ment, with blood­less, floun­der­ing char­ac­ters divorced from the esca­lat­ing mad­ness that swirls around them — some­thing that irrec­on­cil­ably con­tra­dicts the grim­ly holis­tic themes of uni­ver­sal cul­pa­bil­i­ty that are at the heart of McCarthy’s script.

These dis­ar­rayed plan­ets only tru­ly line up for the already infa­mous scene in which Fass­ben­der lis­tens aghast while Bar­dem recounts a sex­u­al three-ball between him­self, his schem­ing tro­phy girl­friend Cameron Diaz’s front bot­tom and the wind­screen of his Ferrari.

It was,” Bar­dem recalls, with a mix of sex­u­al ter­ror and pure holy won­der, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry…”

It is a doozy of a scene that will like­ly live on for all the wrong rea­sons. In con­text, it is the one, sur­re­al moment when the film’s mis­matched gauges click togeth­er to remind us that — as the poet once said — cir­cum­stances rule men; men do not rule cir­cum­stances, and that the world can, in a heart­beat, pull us into unimag­in­ably strange and dis­turb­ing places from which there is sim­ply no direc­tion home.

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