The Counselor

Ridley Scott – 2013 – England

  

It isn’t often that a movie wins me over, but that’s mainly because I typically watch stuff I have reason to believe I will like.  I saw this primarily out of respect for Ridley Scott and Michael Fassbender, even though I fully expected The Counselor to be just another smart-assed, cooler-than-thou, wannabe-edgy, semi-tongue-in-cheek crime drama like Oliver Stone’s Savages (2012) and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain (2013).  Within the film’s first ten minutes, I was quite unimpressed, annoyed and ready to make with the fast-forward button.  But then came a scene in which Cameron Diaz – (one of my least favorite stars) – goes into a confessional for no other reason than to grill the priest about the warped view of women he must have since the bulk of the confessions he hears come from women feeling guilty about their sexual feelings and transgressions.  The scene isn’t momentous, but it made me start looking at the film in a different way.  And it also underscored one of the film’s mounting themes; the inability of men to comprehend women.  There is a strange and disconcerting premise throughout the film having to do with primordial male anxieties and horrors regarding conception, birth, sex and the entire reproductive process.  On the surface, though, the film is about a nameless and successful American lawyer (Fassbender) who decides to dabble in the South American drug trade; apparently on the basis of observing how easy it seems to be for the mid-level crooks he encounters in his practice, whom he apparently assumes were betrayed by their inferior intelligence.  The original screenplay by renowned novelist Cormac McCarthy, especially its dialogue, seemed a bit strained and obvious at first, but I gradually realized that this is the result of its disregard for polished film-school construction.  This has made the film extremely unpopular with those who find its script too stylized and symbolic.  For example, audiences trained to identify plot-holes as evidence of bad writing, while ignoring virtually everything else about the film, have much to grumble about with The Counselor.  I can’t argue with most of the gripes about it, except to say that I was intrigued enough to see it through and then watch it a second time, and that any film that goes so far off track from the mainstream deserves a little respect.  I do believe that the virulent condemnation of the film is hasty, though, and that future generations may regard it as a major work in Ridley Scott’s filmography; not unlike his now-classic Blade Runner (1982), which – believe it or not – was a critical and commercial failure.