Film dialogue needn’t be realistic to work. Think of the distinct patter of an Aaron Sorkin script or the staccato back-and-forth between two David Mamet characters. Both sing their own kind of music, while neither resemble something you’re likely to overhear in daily life.
And yet it’s the dialogue — too often too slick and speechifying — that I most fault for making director Ridley Scott’s The Counselor merely a good rather than a great film. Everybody talks like a philosopher. Drug lords, jewelers, waste disposal workers, proprietors of rundown restaurants, in the world according to first-time screenwriter (and acclaimed novelist) Cormac McCarthy, all are full of wit and wisdom regarding man’s place in this ugly and desperate world.
The film’s protagonist, known only as the Counselor (Michael Fassbender), is a notable and ironic exception. (McCarthy, author of Blood Meridian and The Road, has a fondness for nameless characters.) The Counselor, a lawyer, isn’t ever doling out counsel; he’s receiving it. That’s because he’s entered into an unfamiliar realm. In dire financial straits (though his sleek El Paso home and Bentley hide the fact), he turns to sketchy friend Reiner (Javier Bardem) for the opportunity to finance a drug deal that promises to yield millions in return.
Reiner and a go-between named Westray (Brad Pitt) warn him of the consequences if the deal goes south, and that he’s involving himself with people who will not hesitate to take a life for even a slight offense. The Counselor is sure he can handle it, so he plows ahead.
Of course the deal doesn’t unfold as planned, thanks to Reiner’s cold-blooded girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz), who has an agenda of her own. Soon the Counselor must scramble to protect himself and his fiancée, Laura (Penélope Cruz).
McCarthy’s script takes passages of dialogue that might have been spoken in a tone of soulful meditation in some Terrence Malick film and grafts them onto a relatively pedestrian Hollywood thriller plot. The result is that a movie that should be full of emotional tension plays instead like an intellectual exercise. Everyone and everything is held at a distance from us. Since the characters often speak as though they’re on the outside of their own lives curiously looking in, we’re left at an even further remove.
And yet, there’s still much to like. I scribbled many lines in my notebook that I hoped to reflect upon later, lines I might celebrate as brilliant in the pages of a novel even if on-screen they separated me from the story.
The ruthless Malkina is responsible for both the scene most likely to be Tweeted about (in which she literally makes love to a car) and for speaking what seems the film’s most important bit of dialogue, about her love of watching Reiner’s pet cheetah hunt down rabbits. She admires how, for a wild predator, there is no distinction to be made between who it is and what it does.
That’s very unlike men, unlike the Counselor, unlike those who try to keep those spheres separate, who don’t expect to pay for sins hidden tidily away. And it’s unlike The Counselor (the movie), a would-be philosophical treatise hoping to deliver an emotional punch that never lands.
