Ridley Scott (2013)
Worthless. The combination of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy was evidently enough to attract plenty of talented actors. Perhaps Scott thought too that McCarthy guaranteed a piercingly intelligent script (this is his first original screenplay for cinema). If so, he was wrong. In the first scene, Michael Fassbender as the title character (the Counsellor is yet another man with no name) is in bed with his girlfriend, played by Penélope Cruz. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. She asks, ‘What time’s your flight?’ He replies, ‘7.40 – to Amsterdam’. Then she asks, ‘You mean to say you’re going off again already?’ She must have known he was going off again already in order to ask what time his flight was. McCarthy occasionally reminds you that he’s well read. Brad Pitt, as (I’ll quote the character summaries from Wikipedia) ‘a womanizing, charismatic middleman’, tells Fassbender, ‘But that was in another country. And besides’ – because he’s talking about a man, after all! – ‘the wretch is dead’. As I was getting up to leave after nearly an hour, Javier Bardem – ‘a charismatic entrepreneur by day and an underground drug kingpin by night’ – came out with a sentence including the words ‘in love with easeful death’. No half measures. Occasionally, McCarthy produces an epigram of his own, as when Cameron Diaz – ‘a malicious woman who lacks moral empathy’ – declares that ‘Truth has no temperature’. In spite of all this charisma and literacy, The Counsellor is entirely stupid. McCarthy’s lines and Ridley Scott’s tin ear deserve each other but Scott’s lack of humour and of a light touch make heavy weather of the material. The pace is pedestrian. The tawdry opulence of the lives on display hasn’t the slightest tacky appeal.
The Counsellor is, according to IMDB, ‘a lawyer [who] finds himself in over his head when he gets involved in drug trafficking’. The film was a first for me in that I haven’t before used the warning on the on-screen certificate as a reason for exit. (When I see the certificate I usually think: it’s a bit late now to decide not to see it.) With the promise of ‘strong, bloody violence’ in the second hour there was no point wasting any more time watching characters you couldn’t care less about. Probably no one would be right for the lead but Michael Fassbender is miscast in that – although he really is charismatic – he’s more an actor than a star. He approaches the role as if there was a character to bring out. Since there isn’t, he seems dull and shallow. Penélope Cruz – possibly because she’s playing ‘a naïve and generally positive, religious woman who values tradition’ – is relatively likeable. Javier Bardem maintains his unchallenged run of daft hairdos but this is the first time that tonsorial error is compounded by mechanical acting. In what I saw of the movie, Brad Pitt barely registered at all. Bruno Ganz is lively in his one scene as a diamond dealer in Amsterdam (it turns out that Fassbender flew there to buy Cruz an engagement ring). Cameron Diaz has the showiest part and she plays it with what’s either dismaying obviousness or the contempt it deserves. At one point, she goes to confession to revel in her viciousness. As she’s not a Catholic, the priest (Edgar Ramirez) asks if she’s thought of taking ‘instructions’ and she wittily replies, ‘I’m not very good at taking those!’ This is how crap McCarthy’s writing. It would normally be ‘instruction’ in the singular but the plural’s needed for the gag line so what the hell – and the priest’s probably Mexican anyway. He seems both a nice and an intelligent fellow: Diaz gets on his nerves so much that he gets up from the confessional and walks out. This was shortly after the first audience departure from Curzon Soho and shortly before mine.
21 November 2013
