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.
Start with the misogyny. The Counselor
hates women. Not in any interesting way, just in an angry old-guy way, as long stretches of dialogue focus in on how women are either sexually
voracious, Kali-destroyer goddesses with vaginas like the mouths of catfish ("It
was too gynecological to be sexy," one of our poor male jackrabbits
complains), or sexually ripe blood-puppies at the beck and call of handsome
guys bearing large diamonds and maybe cardboard bundles of cash. Asked to talk
dirty, one of the latter variety can only muster, "I want you to put a
hand up my dress." As delivered by mumbly/squeaky Penelope Cruz, it's more
a cold shower than an inviting come-on. But then, as her character Laura's
unnamed lawyer-boyfriend explores the landscape, he discovers that she's "sopping."
That's right. She's likened to a child, but she's moist down there–not too
fine a point that it isn't raised again later, right before her stupidity places her in the traditional role of hostage/victim in her boyfriend's story. The
worst is Cameron Diaz's cat-eyed, cheetah-obsessed, accent-indeterminate
Malkina, consort of lovable go-between Reiner (Javier Bardem) and absolutely
incapable of delivering the mouthfuls shovelled in there by McCarthy. She's
the fatale, I guess, in this bombastically empty moral fable (the film
is a companion piece in more ways than one to Denis Villeneuve's
similarly-pitched Prisoners), and asking her to be the smartest person
in a room isn't merely ill-advised, it seems cruel. It's the same kind of
miscalculation as casting young Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III as the object of
all desire, so off that it confuses the characters' motivations. In a thriller
this densely-plotted, you don't recover once it starts to wobble; The
Counselor starts to wobble immediately.
The titular Counselor (Fassbender) needs
money, possibly to buy a giant diamond for sweet, dumb, horny Laura, so he
agrees somehow to be involved in a drug deal with the Mexican cartel. We know all about the Mexican cartel, because either we watch "Breaking Bad" or
we're generally xenophobic, and so we know this isn't a good idea. Many
people, including the Counselor's partners in this endeavour, Westray (Pitt)
and Reiner, try to warn him in long, wandering monologues that express the moral morass of the universe. Try to understand, there's only
madness out there, and entropy, and sin, lots of sin, you-can't-avoid-it levels
of sin. When Malkina attends Catholic confession to tell her sins, the hunky
young priest abandons the confessional in outrage. Let me explain it this
way. If you examine the bookshelves in Reiner's study–and you will, because
you'll be bored–you'll note that there are two copies of a book
on "cool houses," one on "cool hotels," and one copy of
a book of photographs by David Bailey. David Bailey is an English photographer
who sort of invented the "mod" look–one of his collections of photos
is called The Birth of Cool. Because Ridley Scott is as vacuous a
filmmaker as McCarthy is now a self-conscious, pompous writer, he has given
this character Reiner the three books he referenced for the sets and style of
the film. There are cool houses, cool hotels, and cool people populating them.
The deal goes bad. Did I mention that Rosie
Perez shows up briefly, very briefly, as a nasty mama in prison who offers a
blowjob to the Counselor that the Counselor rebuffs? It's not worth mentioning.
What's interesting to me about The Counselor is that it's the
rare example of a movie that doesn't mean anything that appears to not want to
mean anything, but means the wrong kind of nothing it intends not to mean. What
I'm saying is that The Counselor wants to create a moral wasteland where
one bad decision causes the destruction, entire, of several lives and
storylines, and there's no explanation or reason for any of it, but actually
creates a simplistic, sloppy thriller that is exactly as nihilistic, and in the
same way, as those Germans who harass The Dude in The Big Lebowski. In
other words, The Counselor is meaningless, not about
meaninglessness. Bruno Ganz has the film's best moment as a diamond dealer who
describes his job as a cynical one in that it's only looking for flaws–like
my job, for instance, except just like him, I find real joy in
discovering beauty and art in imperfection…and commensurate outrage and disappointment in seeing hubris and incompetence in
imperfection. The Counselor is reminded often that he's a naïf in the affairs
of evil; everyone tells him so. Everyone also tells him that the world is evil–the
blood-dimmed tide that Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff refers to in No Country
For Old Men has drowned the world and, no, McCarthy isn't shy about
cannibalizing his own words to nourish this foundling child. Everyone spends so
much time telling that the action, when it comes on bloody and extreme, is
funny (unintentionally, I think), if not nearly as funny as the monologues given
to Malinka that Diaz valley-girls out in sneers and vamps.
What saves The Counselor from
worst-of-the-year status, besides Ganz, is another agile turn by Bardem, who's
making it a habit now of stealing movies, even ones with cheetahs. Fassbender is
fast becoming indistinct to me–another Christian Bale, perhaps, not so much
chameleonic as invisible. He cries convincingly, shouts well, does an American
accent like a champ, but at the end of the day, he's nothing more than the
broad caricature of a great actor. To be fair, the material is so weak that I'm
not sure anyone could have saved it. Consider that the Counselor throws his cell away and borrows a stranger's to call his fair, sweet, horny Laura to
tell her to go home and wait for him, and she in turn Expedias a hotel from their home computer and delivers the news to him over an unsecured phone he's
procured from wherever it is you buy telephones while the Mexican cartel is watching you. (Did I also mention that Hank from "Breaking Bad" cameos as Hank from "Breaking Bad"?) If the point is that the Counselor
is stupid, I get it, but why make him smart first unless you've written
yourself into a circle? I enjoy elliptical films as much as anyone else; I even like
pretentious films, because if you're not trying to do something, I wonder
sometimes why you'd bother. I don't like films that are wilfully bad to illustrate a
point that isn't profound but tired, exhausted even. Men don't understand women
and fear their sexuality? I knew that. Bad choices tend to snowball? Knew that,
too. The irony, of course, is that The Counselor the movie is very much
like the Counselor the character: really fucking stupid and inconsistent,
though it thinks it's smart and capable until it's too late. Honestly, if you
must, see it for the scene where Reiner describes (and then Scott shows)
Malinka fucking a windshield. Now that's entertainment.
The only part of Suttree you enjoyed was a scene where a homeless man bludgeons a pig? For some reason I find that that a lot more depressing than the fact that this movie blows.
Perfect review. I concur with your choices of good McCarthy books, and I actually think that Blood Meridian is a stand-alone because McCarthy started chasing after Melville and Milton, who he doesn’t hold in such unquestioning, god-like reverence as he does Faulkner.
But the emperor’s clothes really fell off with this atrocity of a screenplay.
Recent Chaw tweet: “Hey everybody, Richard Roeper loved THE COUNSELOR…”
Slightly less recent Chaw tweet: “In light of the recent badness of THE COUNSELOR, we should give a second look to ONLY GOD FORGIVES which is the successful version.”
Roeper’s quote on Rotten Tomatoes for OGF: ” This is one of the most shocking and one of the best movies of the year.”
Hmm.
There are so few movies I want to see. This one I was planning to see because of Javier Bardem. Now you ruined it for me. But I have to admit that I already suspected that I would not like it after watching the promotion and the trailers in the last days.
“the Coens are our most gifted literary critics”
Are you talking about among directors? Otherwise, it’s an absurd statement.
Richard Roeper loves The Counselor because he’s a fan of the “glorious mess movie.” That ‘tonal-clash crazy-weird terrible-in-a-fun-way’ movie. But is that what this is?
It’s hard to tell from the reviews if the movie is an ambitious failure or a boring misfire or some unholy mix of both. Either way…I wouldn’t waste my money on seeing it in theaters.
It’s all a matter of opinion, but i think Walter is uncharitable to McCarthy’s other books besides the one or two he actually likes. The Border Trilogy has its ups and downs, and I’d agree that The Crossing is the high point, although it’s hardly perfect. The endless merits of Blood Meridian hardly bear repeating. The early books deserve better, though: Child of God is not a fragment so much as a complete and hideously engaging portrait of Ballard; its brevity is to its credit, and I wish a few of Cormac’s other books were a bit slimmer. Conversely, Suttree is enormous and excellent: funny, atypical, and earnest. Saying that it has nothing to offer except for the pig scene is as glib and tiresome as saying that The Crossing has the bit with the wolf and not much else. Outer Dark is likewise excellent, and its only major weakness is that it does feel like a warmup for Blood Meridian, and as a result is a bit eclipsed by it.
I’m also fine with the newer stuff. I liked The Road well enough, I think Sunset Limited can work beautifully as a two-man play (I’m honestly curious why Walter found the HBO film so geriatric, outside of its superannuated stars). No Country is an odd duck, entertaining but with relatively low stakes. The idea that the Coens somehow spun straw into gold with this one always struck me as curious, as they basically just copied the book with the sort of comprehensiveness that Peter Jackson has been (sadly) taking to The Hobbit. Its a fantastic movie from fantastic filmmakers, but it doesn’t feel quite its own thing, and in retrospect I still sort of wish There Will Be Blood had gone home with the statue that year.
Jeremy3 is spot on. If you mean the Coens are the most gifted of all literary critics then that’s absolutely ludicrous; if you mean the most gifted amongst filmmakers, well fine, but what’s the competition? Four or five other people, maybe?
Haven’t seen the film (hehehe), and I wouldn’t be the least surprised if it turns out atrocious or amazing (harder to picture a grey area). By the way, does the film hate all women, or just Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz? To be fair: the first stance is gross misogyny, the latter, completely rational.
The caption gags keep getting more and more awful. I love it.
Chance, the script itself is atrociously, disgustingly, irremediably misogynistic. As great as McCarthy can sometimes write, this film demonstrates how truly sick he really is.
Child of God a fragment? Outer Dark a sketch? The Road flaccid? Cormac’s genius in these novels is his ability to distil the essence of the story he is telling into a series of (often) loosely connected scenes that, apart are equal parts beautiful, horrific and confounding but when taken all together force the reader to re-imagine his own world as being worn thin, transitory and yet fraught with meaning.
**SPOILERS**
Just got back from seeing it. I think the discussion about misogyny is going to follow this film for a while. I’m not sure I have depth to ask this question, but isn’t the misogyny sort of the point given that Malkina is clearly on the extreme end of the film noir femme fatale? It seems to me that McCarthy has always played with cartoonish, extreme archetypes. We haven’t minded much before (isn’t that part of what’s great about him?). What is it about Malkina that makes the whole thing ugly? More, doesn’t Natalie Dormer’s indicate a certain level of self-awareness? She was contracted by Malkina to play the femme fatale role for Westray, but she was deeply uncomfortable with it.
As Walter pointed out, I am surprised that McCarthy cannibalized himself a bit here. He has always circled a short list of themes, but I’ve never felt like he was repeating himself until now.
The Counselor wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but I’m not sure it deserved a savaging like this.
Just want to clarify one thing in my post that may not have been clear. I don’t think McCarthy was trying to be misogynistic, just that it may have been inevitable when he chose to exaggerate that archetype.
Manfried – I’m disappointed to hear about the misogyny, although I’ll see for myself in a day or two. I think even McCarthy advocates (of which I guess I’m one) would admit that his writing is almost purely masculine – women are rarely mistreated so much as completely absent. There are notable exceptions, like the sister in Outer Dark who turns out to be the actual hero of the story.
I’m hoping his jump to a wider audience doesn’t bring on some nasty, Frank Miller type slide into gross, nuns-and-hookers woman hating.