You can say what you will about Ridley Scott and the trajectory his career as a filmmaker has taken, but it’s hard to deny that whenever you sit down to watch a Ridley Scott movie you’re at least going to be watching something that looks nice. Given that we’re all agreed on this point, it’s a good feeling you get when, from the very first frame of The Counselor, it’s clear that what you’re watching is a Ridley Scott movie. The first scene is a bit of a sex scene, where the title character, a lawyer played by Michael Fassbender, is enjoying some afternoon delight with his love interest, a bombshell played by Penélope Cruz. The sequence is filmed exclusively with close-ups on skin and bright white sheets, and it’s really beautiful to look at. Despite the beauty on display though, it slowly starts to sink in that you’re watching a movie that chose to open itself with a sex scene, not unlike The Room did, and that’s when all the problems start.
Blame for the bad first impression and most of what comes next could probably be laid at the feet of the film’s screenwriter, Cormac McCarthy, a living legend of a novelist who has had several of his works adapted into successful movies (No Country For Old Men, The Road) already, and who is making his debut as a writer of original screenplays here. Unfortunately for McCarthy’s reputation as a legend, The Counselor isn’t a very good movie at all. The plot, to the extent that there is one, sees Fassbender’s character breaking bad by stepping out of his law practice and funding an operation meant to smuggle a ridiculous amount of drugs over the border from Mexico into the United States. That drugs are being smuggled is certain, what’s less certain is the role that any of the characters we meet play in the operation, who they’re aligned with, or who they happen to be thinking about double crossing at any given moment. McCarthy’s script never really fills us in on any of the details, and instead chooses to focus on character.
Granted, focusing on character isn’t necessarily a bad direction to go in if your character work is intriguing, but unfortunately that’s not the case here either. Mostly, The Counselor feels like one of those cheesy erotic thrillers from the early 90s that play like dated jokes when you try to watch them today. Tell me that this screenplay started off as a Basic Instinct sequel and I wouldn’t be surprised. Tell me that it’s the work of one of the most respected currently working authors and I’m mostly just disappointed.
The problems with the character work can be pretty well summed up without even moving on from that sex scene that opens the film. Every one of the scenes that Fassbender and Cruz’s characters share seem to be crafted solely with the intention of establishing the fact that they’re wildly in love and that their love is the only thing that’s right and pure in Fassbender’s morally compromised life. They’re not nuanced, authentic-feeling characters so much as they are a drama the narrative needs to play out. The character played by Javier Bardem, who is an associate of Fassbender’s of some sort, is defined mostly by his loud outfits and spiky hair. Cameron Diaz plays a vicious character who likes to watch her pet cheetahs hunt prey out in the desert and who has cheetah spots tattooed on her back. And so it goes.
The main themes of the screenplay seem to gravitate around the ideas that greed naturally runs rampant in capitalist societies and that moral compromises naturally come along with greed, and not only are those ideas that are pretty well tread in Hollywood filmmaking, but they’re also thematics that are handled fairly clumsily here. First off, Hollywood seems to be singularly obsessed with showing us images of the wealthy class living lives of excess, and it’s well past the point that studio productions start telling us stories about different sorts of people. For too long we’ve had to head out to the art house to see anything that focuses on poor people or even middle class folk, and that’s getting tired. For an author who made his bones writing stories about the dusty old west and the grimy realities of river life, having rich people trying to get even richer through shady drug deals being the focus of his first attempt at writing a movie seems like something of a letdown.
Secondly, the methods used to hammer these themes home couldn’t have been more intrusive. Every dialogue scene we get also includes the characters involving themselves in consumption of some sort; eating, drinking, etc. Every character-driven aside involves some sort of salaciously sleazy behavior (grizzly murders, double crossings, weird sex stuff) meant to shock the audience and let us know that what we’re watching is taking place in a world beyond redemption or understanding. It’s all clearly designed to paint unchecked ambition as being a destructive quality to have, but the problem is that none of that message hits with any impact. Sleaze needs to come naturally to a piece of art. All of the shocking murder and sexuality in this film is so clearly crafted to invoke a reaction from an audience that it ends up failing to do so. It’s the visible effort that undercuts things. Trying is so not punk rock. Watching The Counselor feels like watching some old guy in a bedazzled, designer t-shirt’s attempt at blending in at club that they’re way too old to be at, likely because it’s the cinematic equivalent of exactly that. Is sexy, dangerous people living extravagant lives in the modern drug culture really material that’s best handled by a 75-year-old director and an 80-year-old writer? It’s possible someone of that age could make these ideas work in theory, but practically it doesn’t work out here at all.
Despite the level of talent in the film’s ensemble cast, The Counselor doesn’t really get elevated much by its acting either. Fassbender is a fine choice for a leading man, but the character he’s playing here is such a passive victim of his circumstances and is so devoid of any definable characteristics that really he could have been played by anyone. Actually, some of the point of the character seems to be that he is absolutely an anonymous everyman, undone by morally compromised choices that could have been made by any of us. What a waste of this fine actor. Cruz isn’t asked to do much as his romantic interest other than come off as affable and look desirable, and while she does that just fine, there definitely isn’t anything here that’s going to be included when someone makes a highlight reel of her career later on.
The real meaty roles, the big characters that had the potential to make the movie sink or swim depending on how well they came off, are given to Bardem and Diaz, and unfortunately their performances are the worst parts of the movie. Bardem is most effective when he’s given less to do and he has to project from a position of restraint, like he did in the Coen brothers’ version of another McCarthy story, No Country For Old Men. Here his character is charismatic and loud, and mostly defined by a clownish outfit and an outrageous hairstyle, and instead of being the sort of actor who can make those things look more natural, Bardem’s scene-chewing instincts tend to put an emphasis on how outrageous they are and shine a spotlight on how everything you’re watching is just a show.
Diaz is best when she’s playing affable characters who are a bit goofy and lacking in shame, and here she’s completely out of her depth trying to play a predator of a woman who is dangerous, hot-blooded, and oh-so-cool. Every minute of her performance is clearly being performed—nothing looks natural. McCarthy’s wordy, flowery monologues don’t sound good in either of these actors’ mouths, likely for Bardem because he’s not that strong of an English-speaker, and likely for Diaz because she’s just not that strong of an actress when you take her out of her comedy wheelhouse. In the end, it’s only Brad Pitt showing up in a handful of scenes and milking his Brad Pitt persona to amusing effect and Scott’s always impeccable camera work that keep The Counselor from being a total mess, but they’re not enough to keep it from being a bad movie.
