Bad Advice

Here’s a recipe for success in a movie: an original script by Cormac McCarthy, Ridley Scott behind the director’s lens, and a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. So, what went wrong with The Counselor? My expectations were high, so it came as a surprise that, given these ingredients, the movie was not better; more so because I am a Ridley Scott fan. The Counselor is not a bad movie, but it is far from one of Ridley Scott’s better films.

It’s not easy to pinpoint where the flaw lies. It could be that it resides in part with the script itself. Despite how good Cormac McCarthy can be, this seems to be “another take” on a theme well developed in No Country for Old Men. The impossible yet true inhumanity of the drug cartels; greed, greed and more greed that is so voracious as to end up devouring the people possessed by it, driving them to irrationally blind and deadly choices. In The Counselor, however, the story is somewhat confusing and doesn't completely add up. There is a lot of dialogue and too much preaching on morals and lessons to be learned, coming from the most immoral of characters; even Machado’s trite “caminante no hay camino” is recited by a “wise” guy (in both connotations) played in a very corny manner by the singer-actor Rubén Blades.

Javier Bardem and Michael Fassbender

It’s also not just that there is more dialogue in the movie, there is also much less suspense. So while in the amazing No Country for Old Men film adaptation by the Coen Brother’s the main character fights for his life and tries to outwit and outrun his destiny in a thrilling manner, in The Counselor it seems all he can do is try to reason with the unreasoning, and cry. Cormac McCarthy’s style dominates the movie and Ridley Scott sort of just fills it in. It’s hard to find Ridley Scott’s directing here and, with a script like this, it might have been hard to spark more life into the film.

The actors, on their part, with the exception of Cameron Diaz, seem to be reading their lines and come off as rather in-congruent with respect to who they are supposed to be. So the corrupt lawyer and the drug money launderer, played by Fassbender and Bardem respectively, act and talk like your average teenagers in lust and love (“Oh my goodness”, says Fassbender to Cruz at one point in the movie, “are we having phone sex?”).  Brad Pitt is also in the movie, and his character, a middleman for the drug cartels, is also border-line ridiculous. Can someone who has managed to have millions of dollars in off shore bank accounts really be that gullible? 

Cameron Diaz is a surprise in this movie and the exception to the shallow acting. She’s not an actor that I much admire, but she lives her part here and conveys her heartlessness with those icy stares; she’s a woman worthy of fear. Her acting, and the great cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, carry the movie along from set to set (good set design), as we follow this counselor who has sold his soul to our modern day Mephistopheles and is unable to save his beautiful and innocent girl along the way, like in Goethe’s oeuvre. This counselor not only doesn't dole out any good advice, but is also really bad at taking it.