Review: The Counselor

The Counselor is a star-studded affair: Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz. It is written by Cormac McCarthy, whose works are always being adapted for cinema (e.g. No Country for Old Men), much like Daphne du Maurier and Stephen King. Ridley Scott directs. Despite this, The Counselor is a preposterous film. 

The plot is not particularly original. Fassbender’s lawyer character decides to get involved with the narcotics trade, as one does, through a client of his, Bardem’s gangster. Diaz is Bardem’s scheming girlfriend, who has ‘issues’. Pitt is a nutty cowboy middleman, and Cruz is Fassbender’s fiancée. And guess what? Things go pear shaped. There are violent deaths, a funky Mexican soundtrack, and lots of cowboy boots. For me, setting a film in a situation as real and horrendous as Mexican cartel wars and drug trafficking should be for more than mindless fun: maybe as a vehicle for highlighting something terrible, a documentary-style investigation, or an insightful examination. This was none of those things – it was just an easy way to create excitement.

Michael Fassbender is completely out of his depth. He is a damp squib of irrelevance on-screen, especially when sharing a scene with the charismatic Pitt or Bardem. His character doesn’t even have a name. Perhaps everyone kept forgetting it, such was his lack of magnetism. Neither was he a convincing lawyer, although that’s less Fassbender’s fault than those who designed his look. Thankfully, Diaz, Pitt, Bardem and Cruz make up for this. They do captivate, and all, Cruz excluded (she’s the nice one in this), exude Pesci-esque psychopathy. The problem is that these are stock characters. Bardem, for example, is the same flamboyantly dressed oddball with an unfathomable haircut as he was in No Country for Old Men and Skyfall. Pitt is the same sartorially snappy cowboy with greasy long locks and a cocksure attitude as he was in The Assassination of Jesse James and Killing Them Softly.

One thing that The Counselor does have going for it is, surprisingly, that much of it is people talking in rooms. There is no doubt that its sprawling plot makes the viewer think - something which this kind of film very rarely does. Much as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Funeral in Berlin are not simply gunfights – there is intrigue. Most of this thinking, though, is just trying to work out what is going on: a failure to explain the plot doesn't make a movie clever. For all that McCarthy is a brilliant writer, some of the lines are too consciously ‘cinematic’ (‘the truth has no temperature’). The metaphor-laden soliloquies about hunters and greed et cetera are trying to mimic No Country for Old Men, but the wisdom is absent. There are even a couple of cheetahs, resplendent in diamond collars, purring and hunting – how metaphorical! Or just impractical and a clear health and safety hazard. We have the theme of greed stuffed down our throats to show that this film is saying something, but it is hard to swallow because it is portrayed in a two-dimensional fashion. So many details are left unexplained, such as the relationships between characters, that it is a convoluted mess.

The Counselor is a classic case of a badly made, but entertaining, film. The problem is that it is not nearly entertaining enough. I’d suggest buying No Country for Old Men on Amazon.

Yet another bad hair day at work for Bardem