A commission of inquiry should be set up to determine how it is possible that a film that gathers such a collection of talents as ‘The Counselor‘ can disappoint to such an extent. The director is Ridley Scott the author of ‘Alien‘, ‘Blade Runner‘, ‘Thelma & Louise‘ and ‘Gladiator‘, the screenwriter is the successful novelist Cormac McCarthy at his first original script but the author of the novel that inspired the wonderful ‘No Country for Old Men‘ , and the cast includes Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Bruno Ganz – each of them a reason to make a film in which they feature a ‘must see’. And yet, this drama that takes place in the world of the cartels of drug traffickers at the border between Mexico and the United States, although well garnished with violence and sex, fails to capture and retain the attention of viewers and leaves an impression of confusion and of a terrible waste of talent.
The ‘counselor’ (Michael Fassbender) is an ambitious lawyer whose name we never know. In the desire to raise his standard of living and to please his beautiful fiancée Laura (Penélope Cruz) he enters the service of the mob that transports drugs on both sides of the border. One of the transports goes wrong and the Counselor will be suspected by the Mexican drug cartel that he is reponsbile. The punishment for traitors is terrible. Moral decay and complicity in crime can only lead to disaster – this would be the not-so-subtle moral of this story.
If the moral intention is obvious, the story is quite complex and could be interesting, but the way it is told makes it unnecessarily cryptic for viewers. The film is difficult to watch, many characters appear and disappear and not all of them have a reason to be on screen, there are no details that link the episodes of the story and give motivation to some of the characters’ actions. I believe that to blame here is the fact that Cormac McCarthy‘s script (he is a valuable novelist, but for the first time a screenwriter) does not seem to have been – surprisingly – advised and corrected by the director to make the film clearer to the public. Maybe there was an intention that escapes me, but the fluidity of the story I was expecting from a director like Ridley Scott is missing. Worse, some of the main characters are reduced to being nothing more than their own stereotypes, including the two gangsters played by Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt. Penélope Cruz is a wasted talent in this film. The same can be said about Bruno Ganz, from whose role it seems that essential parts fell out on the editing table, parts which can be seen only in a special version of the director, but not in the standard distributions. Michael Fassbender copes quite well with the complex role of the Counselor, but I missed something in his interpretation as well, perhaps precisely because the moral of the story is too predictable. The most interesting role is that of Cameron Diaz, who seemed to me the only one who manages to transform Malkina’s character from the gangster girlfriend into the pivot of the whole story. The concentration of talent involved in making this film far exceeds the result.