The Counselor

The Counselor lost me when Cameron Diaz had sex with a car.

No, that’s not a typo or a joke. That actually happens in the movie. Such contact with an inanimate object didn’t surprise me in a certain other release this weekend, but I did not expect it from something with this much top-level talent involved.

Indeed, just by the people on both sides of the camera alone, The Counselor seems like a movie that can’t fail. It’s written by the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men. Its director is Ridley Scott, who I don’t have to elaborate on to film buffs (for those I do need to, his résumé includes Alien, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down, to name a few). And the cast is the kind most productions would only dream of.

Like No Country, scribe Cormac McCarthy contemporizes the Western genre, spinning a bleak, violent yarn set amidst the drug trade on the U.S.-Mexico border. Michael Fassbender plays the protagonist, a lawyer only referred to as “The Counselor” (playing off the Western trope of the nameless lead character, perhaps). He’s got it pretty good, with a nice house, expensive clothes, and a beautiful fiancé (Penélope Cruz). But stupidly, he decides to get involved in the drug trafficking via one of his clients (Javier Bardem), a hard-living drug lord, to make a big payday. Things go south for him and everyone around him very quickly.

McCarthy’s works as an author are relatively sparse in their prose, with minimal dialogue that’s blended into the text instead of separated by quotation marks. In film adaptations, the characterization is instead more in the characters’ faces and actions, as well as the desolate but picturesque scenery that sets the mood. But here, in his first produced original screenplay, the writer goes heavy on the dialogue. Lots of it. There’s some pretty scenery and a few bursts of bloody violence, but much more time is spent on the main players talking away. A lot of it is quite compelling, delivered with great poise and energy by the cast, and speaking volumes about their characters.

But it gets to a point where there’s too much dialogue, where the endless chatter pushes so much of the major events off screen that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. There are also some not-so-good exchanges, the nadir of which is the car scene I already described. It doesn’t show the action too explicitly, but it's clear enough, and intercut with graphic narration from Bardem that borders on aroused and horrified. It’s so sophomoric, so crass, so unsexy and unnecessary that it’s actually hilarious to witness in a bad way (unfortunate, because otherwise, Diaz’s character goes from looking like merely an exotic sex kitten at first to the most interesting one in the picture).

That kind of says it all about the movie: flashy visuals and stylized, testosterone-fueled dialogue is the focus, and the plot is secondary. Which is too bad, because the story turns out to be a well-crafted spider web of double-crosses and confusion that’s fun to solve. At least, until you actually solve it; when I did (at least I think I’ve got it figured out), I realized the narrative forgot about the title character completely. It’s never quite made clear what exactly Fassbender’s role in the whole criminal plot was. He willingly enters the drug trade, but he acts like a meek bystander the second half of the movie, crying and unraveling like a victim in an anti-drug PSA. Not exactly a compelling protagonist.

In all, the film is like an amateurish attempt to emulate Quentin Tarantino—with tons of dialogue and gratuitous excess just for the hell of it and recycled archetypes we’ve seen before—that somehow managed to lure several big stars. That’d be bad enough from any hackneyed filmmaker, but from longtime masters of their craft like Scott and McCarthy, it’s especially disappointing.