Why The Counselor is Unwatchable
The Counselor. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
Ridley Scott’s 2013 film The Counselor is an absolutely terrible movie. And it shouldn’t be. Therein lies the puzzle. Scott followed up the impossibly ambitious Prometheus with a smaller, more intimate $25 million crime thriller that by all rights should have been amazing. It features a stellar cast - Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz - and is written by Cormac freaking McCarthy. And it’s about very Cormac McCarthy things like Texas, Mexico, crimes and bad people.
But, you know, that’s the alchemy of movies. Sometimes all the parts are there, but they don’t come together to make a good or even watchable film. Instead you watch a terribly written and plotted movie featuring a scene that has (accurately) been described as Cameron Diaz having sex with a car windshield. At this point, in the words of the Talking Heads, you may ask yourself…. how did I get here?
Well, there’s a couple roads that led us down this path. One, The Counselor - whether on purpose or merely through its poorly conceived existence - is trying to be No Country for Old Men. You’ve even got Javier Bardem hamming it up and Cormac McCarthy. But McCarthy is not the Coen brothers. Also, good novelists (and he is a very good novelist) do not always automatically make for good screenwriters. The script is clunky and frankly extremely boring and it fails to ever really engage the viewer in what is happening. But, really, he should have from the beginning tried to distinguish it more from its much more famous, and vastly superior cinematic cousin.
The other thing is that Ridley Scott has not shown the same fluency and skill with crime films as he has with other genres. Thelma & Louise notwithstanding (which was itself a very unconventional kind of crime film) American Gangster was merely a fine but not spectacular movie, and The Counselor does nothing to refute the idea that Scott doesn’t really have a knack for shooting crime. It just doesn’t pop. This is of course rooted in the fact that it has a terrible script, but even Ridley Scott couldn’t save this film from itself and polish it up and that is quite telling.
The producer team behind The Counselor was also involved in adapting Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road which was an equally, perhaps even worse, movie. This suggests to me that this team is simply ill-suited for adapting Cormac McCarthy’s writings for the screen. Furthermore, the complete lack of success by every other writer-director-producer team in adapting his work really underscores the brilliance of the Coen brothers and how they can look at properties that aren’t really filmable and make them into something fantastic. If anybody could have done that for The Counselor, one would think it would be a gifted director like Ridley Scott. That even he couldn’t do it is perhaps an indication that Cormac McCarthy novels should not be made into any more films.
