The Counselor

Impressed by the extravagance of his eccentric friends Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Malinka (Cameron Diaz), the unnamed counselor (Michael Fassbender), a successful criminal defense attorney, partners with cartel middleman Westray (Brad Pitt) to import drugs from Mexico. But when the deal goes bad, the counselor, his fiancée Laura (Penelope Cruz), and everyone around them find themselves in grave danger.

Perhaps more so than any film in recent memory, The Counselor is less than the sum of its parts. Written by one of America’s greatest living novelists (Cormac McCarthy), helmed by a tried-and-true director (Ridley Scott) and featuring an A-list cast, there is, on paper, no reason why this film shouldn’t work. And yet in practice, it simply doesn’t.

The blame rests almost entirely with its screenwriter. Part of what makes McCarthy’s novels – and No Country For Old Men, the most successful screen adaptation thereof – compelling is the juxtaposition of expansive landscape and minimalist dialogue. This allows for both a healthy dose of symbolism and for characters to define themselves through action. The Counselor, in contrast, is an overly talky film wherein characters eruditely wax philosophical mid-conversation for minutes on end. This robs the pacing of tension, the characters and their interactions of realism, and the audience of respect. Presumably, we would have recognized the film as a treatise on greed without being clobbered over the head with the idea.

Had someone – such as The Coen Brothers – been around to pare down the peachiness, what was left might well have delivered up to expectations. The film is well-shot, well-scored, and well-cast. The flashy wardrobes form a nice contrast with the stark desert landscapes, the unconventional soundtrack restores some of the lost tension, and the cast does its best with the material. Fassbender starts off as a slightly smug, coolly detached blank slate, but his emotional range grows as his circumstances worsen. Bardem arguably overacts, but in doing so, he injects a sense of fun while Pitt is appropriately cynical. The real surprises here are Diaz and Dean Norris. The former, usually a liability in dramatic fare, is chilling as the avaricious, panther-like Malinka, and the latter, as a drug buyer, does a hilarious 180 from his best-known role as a DEA agent on Breaking Bad.

Upon release, some criticized The Counselor for being both bloody and bleak. Those qualities are a given in McCarthy’s oeuvre. The greater sin here is that The Counselor confuses pedantry and pretension for enlightenment and entertainment.

7/10