The Folly of the Foolish Kingpin

The CounselorDirected by Ridley Scott
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

And so the writer conveys story through the written word, and the filmmaker with the moving image and this is the way it is. Cormac McCarthy must be considered one of the great contemporary American novelists, and it is not insignificant that  he wrote the remarkable “The Counselor”, directed by Ridley Scott, not as a novel but a screenplay, his first in the format to be produced. The writer, confronted directly with the visual medium, has moved his stoic, worldly prose seemlessly from narration to dialog. His characters speak as if outside of themselves, meditating heedlessly about the nature of their own circumstances. They are individualistic, fully-realized and complex characters with unique perspectives, but in each of their monologues can be found a hint of McCarthy’s wry, biblical wit.

For a genre that so typically reserves its dialog for relentless exposition and narrative detail, the effect of McCarthy’s approach is surreal. The titular Counselor (Michael Fassbender), Reiner (Javier Bardem), Westray (Brad Pitt) and the rest become engines for his themes. “The Counselor” works as poem, as prayer. It is on the surface a classic tale of the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico and south Texas, and the hopeless saps that try to play their game without knowing the rules, or thinking themselves exempt from their consequences, but McCarthy’s script doesn’t burden itself with specifics.

Counselor involves himself in a deal with Rainer, apparently to use a new nightclub to launder money from a drug deal. There is a middle man. There is a truck with the load. It has a destination. There are other parties at play here, but we get to know very little of them. This is because “The Counselor is not about whether or not the load makes it to its destination, or how things went wrong (and things do go wrong, as always they must in a movie like this), but about the existential fallout that comes from confronting a titanic force indifferent to their mortality. The cartel exists here as a phantom, an unforgiving conscience looming over the follies of weak men. Counselor is the desperate fool, Rainer the vain playboy, Westray, their middleman, the cynical vet who recognizes exit music when he hears it, and all of them are made to seem small beneath the indiscriminate justice of the cartel.

At its heart though, “The Counselor” seems to be an allegory for the perilous ways that men misunderstand and generalize women. A common theme in conversations throughout the film concerns efforts to understand them: Rainer insisting you can do anything you want to a woman except to bore them. Westray claims a mutual attraction brought Rainer and himself together, and has kept in the game. Rainer’s free-spirited girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz) finally posits to a confession priest that, given all he must hear about sex in that confession booth, he must have a very distorted view of what woman are actually like. That thesis is every male character in a nutshell. And always are there women observing the proceedings, navigating this hyper-masculine world as if on a different plane. In the end they will prove to both survivors and casualties, a dichotomy that defies every man’s effort throughout the film to pigeon-hole them.

“The Counselor” is a brooding, meditative morality play disguised as a thriller, founded on a wealth of style and cynicism from a wise screenwriter and a sure-handed director. The sinister foreshadowing McCarthy has injected into the film’s opening movements transpire with an inevitable momentum, trapping these poor fools in their fates. For Scott, this ranks as a near-masterpiece, and one of the best films in his career. But certainly it is McCarthy’s presence in the words and themes of “The Counselor” that make it so potent. This is not a film that strives for realism, but to express the oppressive sensation that man’s own evil is an insurmountable hindrance, that systematic greed proves to be one of the purest and most remorseless filters for foolishness and inadequacy, that ignorant misogyny does not merely make victims of women, but cripples men’s perspective and value. This is one of the best films of the year.