‘The Counselor’ features big-name actors in dialogue driven movie
“The Counselor” is the first film written by novelist Cormac McCarthy. Previously, his novels have been adapted by others into films, most notably and successfully by the Coen Brothers with their Best Picture Oscar-winner “No Country For Old Men.” Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Gladiator,” “American Gangster”) directed this star-studded crime thriller.
Michael Fassbender plays the Counselor, a wealthy lawyer who is engaged to a beautiful woman named Laura (Oscar winner Penélope Cruz). His “friend” Reiner (Oscar winner Javier Bardem, who won his Oscar for “No Country For Old Men”) lives a wild life full of carnal pleasures and shady business dealings. His wife, Malkina (Cameron Diaz), is a smoldering seductress who has more power than one might believe at first.
The Counselor meets Reiner at a pool party with men that could cut diamonds with their pecs and women who could make men’s mouths drop and eyes pop out like a cartoon character. But everyone is very serious in this film, even if there is a streak of ink black humor that courses through the movie’s cold heart. Reiner, with his spiked hair and colorful, loose shirts, convinces the Counselor to be a part of a major drug deal over the Mexican border. His middleman is Westray (Oscar nominee Brad Pitt), a long-haired womanizer with a cowboy hat and boots. He lets the Counselor know how the deal is going to go down and how this line of work operates. Of course, as one can imagine, the plan goes horribly wrong and by the end of the film, many of the major characters are killed or have their lives ruined.
The real star of the film is McCarthy’s dialogue. A great deal of the nearly two-hour running time is people talking, not chases, gunfights, violence or sex scenes. All of those things happen, do not worry, but a majority of the film is driven by dialogue. There is a bleak juiciness to much of the dialogue. Characters can sit around for five or ten minutes rattling off McCarthy’s words and often the scene ends and the viewer asks, “Wait, what just happened?” The script, like the film itself, is not about where it goes but how it goes. Sometimes the dialogue comes off as quite lofty and would probably work better read on the printed page than said out loud. Most of the conversations are not very realistic because people would not actually sit and talk to each other that way. The actors are all up to the task of reciting the dialogue in ways that make the characters believable even if the words are not.
This film is a far cry from “No Country For Old Men,” which is a masterpiece. It lacks that film’s intensity and looming dread that kept the viewer on edge the whole time. Like “No Country,” “The Counselor” has some creative kills that are perversely enjoyable. There is a memorable sex act in this film that has probably never been performed in a film before. One wishes that a film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Cormac McCarthy and starring five of the biggest stars in Hollywood would be more than just “pretty good,” but it stops short of anything better. “Gravity” demands to be seen in theaters in 3D and “Captain Phillips” will have an even bigger impact on a big screen, but
“The Counselor” is a good one to catch on HBO or Netflix six months later and say, “That was all right.”