The Counselor (2013)
½*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Ridley Scott
by Walter Chaw When I read The Crossing, I believed
it to be the finest American novel in the Southern Gothic tradition since
Faulkner rolled up Yoknapatawpha County under his arm and went home. Then I
read Blood Meridian, and thought I was in the presence of maybe the most
important American author since, who, Pynchon? But after that, Cormac McCarthy dried
up. I didn't care for Cities on the Plain, his wrapping up of the lauded
"Border Trilogy" that began with All the Pretty Horses and
sandwiched The Crossing in between, and I thought No Country For Old
Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire, while The Road was well and
completely flaccid. Going backwards didn't help: Child of God was a
fragment, Suttree had that bit with the pig but not much else, and the
incest fairytale Outer Dark seemed a sketch. But then the Coens adapted No
Country for Old Men as a summary critique of the key themes of McCarthy's
work, and I was entranced again, or at least willing to give his stuff a shot
again. It's the mark of a gifted critic, and the Coens are our most gifted
literary critics, to reanimate something that's been dead for a while. So we
land here, following a too-faithful screen translation of The Road and the curious, forgettable, elderly HBO flick The Sunset Limited (first written by McCarthy as a play) with
the inevitability of a film, The Counselor, based on an original
screenplay by McCarthy, supervised by McCarthy to the point of McCarthy giving
line readings to frickin' Michael Fassbender, and promoted with McCarthy billed
almost as prominently in the breathless trailer as director Ridley Scott and
co-star Brad Pitt. And, yes, this film by a novelist twenty years
past his prime, dabbling now in a new medium like old Michael Jordan playing
baseball, stinks of an almost Greek hubris, an almost Icarean overreaching. The
Counselor is uniquely awful.
