The Counselor

Here is one of the talkiest and most dragged out movies I have ever seen.  The characters in The Counselor talk relentlessly in endless scenes that don't seem to go anywhere.  And then, when that scene is over, and the next one starts, the same thing happens all over again.  It would seem that in writing his first original screenplay, acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy (He wrote the novel that No Country for Old Men was based on.) fell so in love with listening to his own characters' dialogue, that he sometimes forgot to give them something to talk about, or to make his characters interesting in the first place. 

And yet, it's impossible not to get excited for the movie while the opening credits roll out.  There are some very talented names attached to this movie, setting your expectations sky-high.  The director is the usually reliable Ridley Scott, who knows his way around a thriller like this movie wants to be.  And look at the names in this cast he's rounded up, which includes the likes of Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, and Javier Bardem.  And yet, all the talent in the world would not be able to rise above that damn script, which is not only needlessly wordy, but kind of pointless the more you think about it.  The Counselor is a dark and downbeat story about bad people doing horrible things.  That's fine and good, I have enjoyed many films that followed that example.  Where this one gets it wrong is that it doesn't make these bad people interesting or even intriguing, so we're simply forced to sit and wait for the bad things to happen to them.  Not so much because we want to see these characters go through these horrible things, but because the movie will be one step closer to being over with.

An early scene that kind of set off an internal alarm that the movie was not going to be going anywhere concerned The Counselor himself (he has no name in the script, and is played by Michael Fassbender) having what felt like a five minute conversation on diamond quality.  We understand why the scene is in the film (he's buying it for his soon to be fiance, and it establishes that he enjoys the finer things in life), but it's just so needlessly wordy, and seems to go on forever.  It's pretty much a set up for everything that will go wrong later on.  There are one or two conversations that do catch our interest, such as the scene when one of The Counselor's wealthy friends, a man named Reiner (Javier Bardem), talks about the night his girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) had sex with his car.  It's well told, and has a spark of wit that the rest of the film is missing.  But once again, the scene ends up being long-winded, and we never truly get to know the characters.

Take the nameless Counselor.  He's supposed to be a defense attorney who's torn between his sweet, innocent fiance (Penelope Cruz), and the dark world of drug trafficking that he finds himself pulled into when he becomes desperate for living the good life, and getting big money quickly.  He has to pay off an extravagant diamond ring that he buys his woman early on.  This idea could work, but the character is not fleshed out in any way so that we can sympathize or even relate with him.  He's simply a cypher to move the plot along.  When the drug deal inevitably goes wrong, and people around him start getting hurt or killed, we once again don't feel anything because we know so little about him or the people who surround him.  Even the most interesting character in the movie, Reiner's ice cold girlfriend, never comes across as being as interesting or as evil as she should.  Diaz gives a great, icy performance, but the character seems to go nowhere.

The actors wander in and out of the screenplay, spewing exposition and philosophizing without ever really saying anything.  Take Brad Pitt for example, who shows up as a colorful and seemingly-interesting character, yet still manages to make no impression whatsoever on the audience.  He shows up, he talks for longer than needed, and then he leaves - just like everyone else.  I have nothing against movies that are densely written in terms of dialogue, but in this film's case, there's just nothing to grab us or to follow.  I have a strong feeling that this movie started out as a failed novel tucked away somewhere in Cormac McCarthy's desk drawer, so he decided to turn it into an original screenplay.  If so, he made the wrong choice, as a novel would have been a better opportunity to flesh out these people, and the dialogue wouldn't seem so dense, as he could have broken it up with narrative.  The movie plays like a failed adaptation, where the writer fell so in love with the words in the book, he didn't dare to cut out a single word.

The Counselor is well-directed, and as expected from the cast, the performances are first-rate.  Like I said before, it's the script that brings everything else down.  Ridley Scott needed to find a way to make this material accessible, and he never quite pulls through, even with the talent he was able to attract.  The fact that the studio is giving this film little promotion was perhaps a tell-tale sign that they knew something was wrong.  They were right to worry.  This is one of 2013's most disappointing films.

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