Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender (Kerry Brown/20th Century Fox)A Texas lawyer with a swanky apartment is in the market for a big diamond engagement ring for his sweetie. Sounds like a successful lawyer, whose vocational purview should include things like a trail of evidence. Yet at more than one crucial juncture in The Counselor, the unnamed defense lawyer (Michael Fassbender), leading the kind of privileged life awarded a man who knows how to do his job and knows his way around the criminal element, acts like a rube.
Figures in silhouette meet in a basement lounge to set up a drug deal. The naïve lawyer eagerly listens to the swaggering Westray (Brad Pitt). As Westray feeds his inexperienced conspirator details, his inexperienced co-conspirator begins to take notes. “Don’t write this down,” Westray warns the counselor. Can he be that stupid, or is something else going on? Call it projecting, but the titular anti-hero, armed with a Moleskine not unlike the one I used to take notes on this film, can only be jotting down one thing: the terrible dialogue spat at him by his poorly written foil.
Unfortunately most of my notes are illegible, so you’ll have to take my word for it that Cormac McCarthy, the justly celebrated author whose novels have been successfully translated to great movies like No Country for Old Men, wrote some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in a movie theater this year. All I can make out of my notes is a short line from Brad Pitt: “Reiner’s beyond advising.” Is this how high-stakes dealers talk? Does anyone go around imagining a high-stakes dealer who looks like Brad Pitt casually peppering their conversation with words like “sophomoric”?
I forgave the plot holes of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, but its dialogue was fortunately spare. As plot arcs go, The Counselor is bananas, so bananas that halfway decent dialogue and direction would have made its odd twists of motivation an easy sell. Hell, even bad direction would have worked better — see Normal Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance for a twisted crime drama that makes no sense, is filled with over-the-top bad acting, and is nevertheless completely entertaining.
For all The Counselor‘s flaws, I wasn’t bored. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski gives the movie a clean, efficient look, and Daniel Pemberton’s score is, unlike so much movie music these days, unobtrusive. But time and again, I groaned inside at the awkward, writerly dialogue unconvincingly uttered by a talented cast, most of them at a loss to make the dialogue sound like human conversation.
I wish it were not so. The Counselor is Cormac McCarthy’s first original script, but you would not know he was a major author by listening. When McCarthy’s novels are properly adapted for screen, like in No Country for Old Men, his work provides great music for seasoned actors like Javier Bardem. But the new songs McCarthy has come up with for the current band, including Bardem, are terrible. Is there any right way for Cameron Diaz to deliver a crucial epiphany about cheetahs?
Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz (Kerry Brown/20th Century Fox)Diaz is Malkina (even her name is forced), a grotesque fun-house femme fatale who keeps pet cheetahs, has tattoos to match, and has a special relationship with automobiles. The counselor’s naïve fiancée is played by Penelope Cruz, wide-eyed and as innocent as Cruz can muster. These are not rich, well-developed characters but types, albeit in the case of Malkina, a type with unusual details.
It’s not just the script’s fault that the movie doesn’t work. Defenders of the film compare it favorably to last year’s Killing them Softly, which I liked, but the closer parallel is Killer Joe, which I didn’t. Director William Friedkin showed nothing but contempt for his cast of dimwits, but at least he got vivid performances out of his actors, especially Matthew McConaughey. The right director might have pulled a loopy black humor out of McCarthy’s overheated literary banter, maybe adding Pinteresque pauses and beats to give this uninspired speech a good rhythm. But the actors seem lost.
There’s one minor exception: John Leguizamo. He’s a throwaway character with maybe one minute of screen time, but he’s the only one here who comes off like a recognizable human. He doesn’t have the gravitas or cachet of Javier Bardem, but he would have made a more convincing Reiner.
Okay, there are two other exceptions: cheetahs. These symbols of wild passion, domesticated, featured in one of the movie’s climactic scenes, a scene that holds its gaze a beat longer than it needs to and ends up on an unexpected path. Why does this scene work when so much else doesn’t? No dialogue. I have to give credit to The Counselor for taking such a strange journey, but I wish its actors didn’t seem so lost in it.
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Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Cormac McCarthy
With Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz
Rated R for graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language
Opens today at a theater near you
