It’s a shame about Ridley Scott. He is, without a doubt, a
very talented filmmaker and you can’t deny his skill as a stylist. In fact, I
dare say that as far as visual aesthetics go, film for film, he is almost
unparalleled. Unfortunately, within the
last 10 years or so, his work has been marred by bad screenplays and theatrical
assemblies that edit his films to the point of incoherence. “The Counselor”, another south-west noir
penned by novelist Cormack McCarthy, suffers greatly from an overwritten
screenplay and campy performances that overshadow the obvious talent that Scott
tries to bring to the film.
It’s
hard not to watch this and compare it to Cormack’s near-perfect adaptation in
the Coen Brother’s Oscar winning “No Country for Old Men”. The set-up is similar and the pay off—though
not effectively delivered in “The Counselor”—aims to please and depress the
audience in the same way. But whereas the Coens were able to reduce the source
novel to its essentials and tell the story in hauntingly sparse visual terms—choosing
only key scenes to include McCarthy’s elusive prose—in this film, with Cormack
now in charge of his first screenplay, a power imbalance muddles the
storytelling, where his words and murky themes dominate the screen.
The
unnamed Counselor, played by the always watchable Michael Fassbender, is a
lawyer who has recently become engaged to his dutiful girlfriend Laura
(Penelope Cruz). To help fulfill her
fantasies of wealth, the counselor decides to aid in an across-the-border drug
deal with a flamboyant dealer (Javier Bardem) and his lethal cat-like lover
(Cameron Diaz). In doing so, the lawyer gets lost in a shadowy maze of deceit and murder and--as is usually the
case--learns that crime never pays. Somewhere in all of this, Brad Pitt
stops by to recite pages of uninteresting metaphors, Rosie Perez has a psychic
link with her motorcycling drug-mule son and Cameron Diaz does an X-rated
reenactment of Tawny Kitaen’s hood-of-the-car dance from Whitesnake’s “Here I
Go Again” music video.
In
trying to fit a novel's worth of information in a two hour film, though not
based on any of his previous work, McCarthy fills this script with endless
dialogue set-pieces that weigh the movie down so much that it never seems to budge from scene to scene. The actors are all there to present their best work and it's clear in every scene that everyone is certainly trying. However, with Cameron as the vampy femme fatale—complete
with pet cheetahs and silver claw-like fingernails—and with Bardem turning in
another one of his crazy hair-cut performances, these pulpy elements jarringly clang
against the dower moralizing of the plot and Scott's vista-laden visual
design.
I
really wanted to like this film and I don’t fault it for being too weird or
arty, but, in the end, this well-intentioned thriller is an insufferable
snooze. Michael Fassbender and Brad Pit,
two of Hollywood’s most interesting actors, share several scenes together and yet
here they couldn’t be more boring. The dialogue is stylized to the point of
droning into a fuzzy static and McCarthy’s themes are somehow clumsily obvious
and frustrating unclear at the same time.
Ridley
Scott directs the hell out of this film and successfully makes a junky B-movie
look and feel like a portentous A-picture. But even with a few creative
decapitations and soft-core sex scenes sprinkled in, he still couldn’t save
this inert, convoluted, lukewarm mess of a movie.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013
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