Movie Review : The Counselor (2013)
We all have that resourceful friend. The one with great fucking ideas literally oozing out of him. That friend who dispatches bits of philosophy meant to help you succeed, but who never gets involved in anything. That guy thinks he's brilliant, but he's full of shit. Ideas are beautiful and fun, but they don't always pan out. In theory, the idea of teaming up southern writer and living legend Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott, director of immortal films such as BLADERUNNER and GLADIATOR, on a movie project seems foolproof. How can it go wrong when everybody knows what they're doing? A
lot can go wrong.
THE COUNSELOR is a great movie, but it's also profoundly misunderstood. Its impenetrable nature confused moviegoers around the world expecting a standard gritty organized crime flick and force is to admit, not every piece of its puzzle fits. THE COUNSELOR is flawed, dissonant, ridiculous at times, but when the story you're telling is deeply satisfying, technical flaws don't matter as much.
The nameless counselor (Michael Fassbender) is a lawyer Who's strapped for money. At least, that's what he says to his business partner. So he turns to the Juarez cartel for what seems to be an easy score. But nothing's easy if the stakes are high and if you don't know the ropes, someone who does is waiting for the opportunity to chew you up and spit you out. When the transfer of goods doesn't go as planned, the counselor finds himself to be in over his head and he cannot turn to anybody for help. In the underworld controlled by the Mexican drug cartels, failure makes you a liability and falling out of favour with you cartel associate means something a lot more alarming than your own death: It means the disintegration of the world you've grown up in and helped shape as a human being. It's the end of everything you've always known.
I know I'm being pretty fucking abstract here. You have to understand that THE COUNSELOR is a highly metaphorical movie and if you can't go to that place where you can appreciate abstraction, don't even watch it. I'm not very knowledgeable in the ways of the cartel, so I can't assess the level of realism of the cartels' methods featured, but I know that much: they symbolize death in THE COUNSELOR. You never see the political inner workings of the organization, here. They are not developed characters. All you see of the cartel is death. Their members swarm the frame, take a person's life and walk away. It's often done in spectacular fashion, but it's all they always do in THE COUNSELOR, kill people. Whoever is outwardly identified at belonging to the cartel walks into the frame, kills someone and walks out. Whatever important business they do is always kept off screen.
I have not even scratched the surface of the symbolism in THE COUNSELOR, but it's an important part of the viewing experience, so I'll leave it at that.
Once you understand (and accept) that whatever you need to know is left for you to decipher, THE COUNSELOR becomes a much deeper and engrossing experience. The long, philosophical trademark diatribes of Cormac McCarthy become imbued with meaning. It's a movie about facing your own disappearance. Your powerlessness against death. I'm sure it freaked a lot of people out. If you're heading into THE COUNSELOR thinking you're going to have a good time, it's not exactly true. It's the kind of ambitious project that seeks to redefine the boundaries of the world you've been living in. I love it, it's why I watch movies and read books, but it might not be your cup of tea. In that case, THE COUNSELOR is going to bum you out worse than a The Smiths outdoor concert on a rainy evening.
You may experience strange feelings during your viewing of THE COUNSELOR. The same kind of feeling than when you discuss pop culture with a beheaded corpse or when you see a man disappear inside in own pants, in one of your nightmares. Pieces don't fit properly. It's because the screenwriting and the direction is so fucking dissonant, it feels like one of the two has been outsourced. They're not communicating with one another. Apparently, Cormac McCarty's screenplay was a metaphysical nightmare to adapt, it's the strangest thing to see Javier Bardem being all smiles, dressed like a clownish version of Hunter S. Thompson and dishing some heavy existential monologues with a half-cocked grin. The cast often seem ill at ease with their lines. Brad Pitt is by far the most comfortable, but THE COUNSELOR is such a visually confusing movie I couldn't say whether it's because he's the best talent of the star-studded cast of if he just has a better-tailored part. The actors are so far out of their element, it's distracting at times.
I loved THE COUNSELOR for being a cartel movie with a purpose that went beyond discussing the atrocities of the cartels. Its philosophical lining was deeply satisfying to me. Even the straightforward storytelling aspects were involving and intellectually stimulating. I loved how Cormac McCarthy wrote a story that maneuvered its way around easy and graphic shortcuts and left the reader to figure his way into the narrative. In accomplishes gracefully what a film like THE LIMITS OF CONTROL struggled to do: build a crime movie out of tension and innuendo. Ultimately, it doesn't matter that the direction and the screenplay sing a tone deaf song. It works anyway.
The team of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy didn't build a timeless monument in THE COUNSELOR, but the end product is a powerful movie that features fantastic writing and a sound technical delivery that compensates for the visual middle crisis it puts the viewer through. Great minds are not always complementary, but sometimes there is just too much talent in the room to fail. Highly recommended.
