Directed by Ridley Scott,”The Counselor” out today is led by it’s star-studded cast consisting of Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, and many other faces who are recognizable.
Walking out of the screening for “The Counselor,” I had no clue what I just watched. I’m still not completely sure I know, but I do know that I enjoyed it. While the acting is good, the best part of the film has to be the screenplay of Cormac McCarthy making his feature film debut. “The Counselor” lives off of McCarthy’s voice and the cast plays off of it so well. “The Counselor” has a pretty basic plot structure: a lawyer only known as The Counselor (Fassbender) who is motivated by material objects descends into the world of drug trafficking to earn quick cash for his wedding to his girlfriend Laura (Cruz). With him is his eccentric, charismatic partner Reiner (Bardem) who has a relationship with Malkina (Diaz) whom he fears more than anyone. The middleman in the operation is Westray (Pitt), who can be described as charismatic as well as a womanizer who knows he’s been in the business for too long and may have overstayed his welcome. The Counselor has a client named Ruth (Rosie Perez) by court appointment and Ruth asks a favor of The Counselor. She asks him if he could bail her son out of speeding ticket which he does. Little does he know that this favor would lead to the demise of not just him, but all of those around him.
What makes The Counselor different than most drug-related films is that the audience is left in the dark almost as often as these individuals in the film and this is what may feel off. The Counselor never allows the audience to enter in on the dealings of Westray that would give us an idea of the drug trades going on and where. Instead, we’re left with The Counselor being our link throughout the film. McCarthy puts a lot of trust in his audience to put the pieces together, but he needs to do a better job of giving the audience more to work with.That being said, McCarthy does do some brilliant work with his screenplay. He’s able to provide philosophical discussion revolving around life, death, sex, and power which are really the largest elements in the film. The drug trafficking is just a device that’s used to link all of these parties together. He also writes what has to be both one of the funniest and most disturbing scenes of the year which is played beautiful by Bardem.
To make this script work, you need the actors to play the parts wonderfully and they do. Fassbender does a great job playing a man who simply wants to have it all to be happy and when things crumble beneath him he never lets up. Cruz, Bardem, and Pitt all play their parts well – Cruz as a naive, loving girlfriend; Bardem as a fearful, eccentric man; Westray as the man who has a taste for women and alcohol. The best of all may be Cameron Diaz in a role unlike any I’ve seen her in before. She’s cold, manipulative, calculating…she’s pretty much the sexiest sociopath you may see in a movie this year. There’s a whole lot of other familiar faces who appear in The Counselor as well, such as Natalie Dormer (“Game of Thrones”), John Leguizamo, and a certain “Breaking Bad’ actor who strays from his past character (you’ll get it when you see it).
”The Counselor” is a movie that sticks with you long after you’ve seen it…I’m still trying to put together all of the pieces. Ridley Scott has created an entertaining, thrilling, and slightly disturbing piece of work. It earns the R rating it’s been given as there’s a lot of sex, blood, and death in some ways you’ve never imagined possible. With “The Counselor,” we’ve given a tale we’ve seen before: man in over his head and things end up going terribly wrong for him. But we’ve never seen it in the way given to us by the team of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy. Ridley Scott is back in a way no one could have ever seen coming and this is good news to film lovers everywhere.
