CliqueClackThe Counselor looks nice but is a muddled mess of mixed messages
‘The Counselor’ tries to be an intense, intimidating thriller with a bitterness apparent and a strong philosophical bent. But it’s really … not so much.
As Shakespeare never said, what’s life without a little risk? And what’s life without movies filled with dreary philosophical arguments about inevitability and bizarre sexual asides? It’s not my life, apparently. In general, we all take risks, as I’ve talked about before, but such things tend to be tempered with sense. At least you’d hope so. But there are those that choose to take risks with their lives, hoping to achieve absurd gains instead of dying younger than they’d prefer. Sometimes these are nihilistic folk, but most people tend to have something or someone they care about above all else. A family or a house or an heirloom, or a prized Chia Pet. Yes, we all take risks, of different levels and degrees of severity. In my review of Runner Runner, which nobody saw and which nobody should see, I mentioned that life is filled with risks, both minor and major, for really just about everybody. But despite our best efforts, we are all victims of chance and reality. Sometimes even when it’ll totally work perfectly, it can’t because someone got hit by a train.
The Counselor is from director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy, who previously had quite a bit of acclaim from writing No Country for Old Men. Javier Bardem comes back from that one, playing Reiner, a character with similarly ridiculous hair as the one from No Country for Old Men, although here it’s played more for laughs and the chaotic nature of the character. The counselor in question is played by Michael Fassbender, and is never explicitly called anything other than … well, “counselor.” He’s a talented and intelligent lawyer who’s gotten mixed up with some shady deals to deal with unspecific and unclear money problems (they are unimportant, because the money doesn’t care about the motivations past the material). Reiner is a nightclub owner helping to facilitate an illegal deal of some sort having to do with the cartels, but is also troubled by his sociopathic girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz). The counselor’s only gal Laura (Penélope Cruz) is a naive innocent girl that’s in love with him and serves mainly as a counterpoint to the other women in the movie, all of whom are morally questionable. Laura is also important because she needs to be a representation of something tangible that the counselor has to worry about. Brad Pitt also shows up as Westray, an enigmatic middle man whose role is never clear and is also really not that relevant other than more ways to talk about hubris and despair.
The movie starts off in a jumble of confusion, constantly introducing more and more characters, sometimes not even using the anchor of Michael Fassbender’s excellent performance to keep things understandable. The plot is a bizarre mess of nonsense and random chance, intermixed with interminable discussions between characters about the nature of inevitability. I would like to have liked this movie more than I did. The acting here is quite strong (even Cameron Diaz, who gets to vamp villainously) and there are some intriguing elements at play. But when the movie is primarily concerned with being an epic tragedy, it begins to forget about telling a story. And then it totally forgets in favor of brutal imagery and mildly amusing subplots and conversations. It is never a good sign at a movie when you check your watch, and it’s even worse when you yawn in boredom. Unfortunately, both things happened to me this time. I suppose that this movie is just a great example of how a whole bunch of talented people can get involved and still not really make something that good. If you really want to see Michael Fassbender in something, watch 12 Years a Slave. He’ll probably get an Oscar nomination for that one, and nobody’s getting anything for this one … probably.
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