© 2016 by James Clark
Ridley Scott readily lets us know that he is an avid searcher amongst the films of newcomers, for the sake of keeping up with the latest thoughts and skills. He never gives us a break, however, about his encyclopedic coverage of films from the past. Unlike Michael Mann, who warmly treasures the impetus derived from the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, our eclectic helmsman here chooses not to explicitly identify that range of inspiration contributing to those heights he so often soars to. As with his breathtaking TV commercials, for Scott it seems to all come down to the season’s hit and its filmic brilliance. A large problem about that strict immediacy is that his formidable perceptiveness ardently digs into the problematics of world historical discernment. His sagas flame high and wide with being on the hunt for this planet’s catastrophic and institutional malignancy. This is long-term work in spades. And though that might constitute a reason for hiding it at the summit of Mount Everest, the forward motion of that contrarian manifold takes place with far more transparency than Scott, a hugely divided agent of popular entertainments— “I don’t make films for other people. I make films for me” –is prepared to tolerate.
Keeping in mind that caveat, with The Counselor (2013) we not only have wave after wave of presentations based upon films of Melville; but, moreover, without this component The Counselor cannot come into its own as a richly tempered hopeful communication. Sure, it’s got a flashy cast and devastating horror hooks. But, to all intents and purposes, it looks the part of a relentless dismissal of every vestige of adult integrity. Seemingly doing his utmost to leave intact the rattlesnake smarts of the Cormac McCarthy screenplay, he declares, “I was very happy with The Counselor. I think it was cynical and too nihilistic for some people, but I like nihilistic.” He likes a lot more than that. And thanks to Melville’s Le Doulos he knows how to royally tip a scale, overloaded with sentient figures amounting to sewage trucks, with an abundance of rhapsody. “Music is dialogue,” is another of Scott’s sayings, one, in fact, which particularly reaps benefits from Le Doulos.
That much said (and left for later), there is, in addition, the very important tendency in a Ridley Scott film to savor anew compelling moments of his own previous films. And in The Counselor, the principal such factor is that of the alien. Here we are not simply about a nondescript rumble of remarkably perverse violators of the law, but we are about the distinct deadliness of aliens, spelled M-e-x-i-c-a-n-s. The setting of this horror, Juarez, Mexico as spilling over to El Paso, Texas, resembles, in aerial shots of the desert surroundings, the asteroid in Alien where there is to be found a species of consciousness harboring an astronomical degree of resentment and ongoing cataclysmically violent ill-will. An adolescent drug runner is killed; and the cartel for which he worked sees fit not only to kill anyone remotely connected to his goings-on (lest someone go unpunished for spoiling their days by being unconducive to their dominance); but to butcher them with infinitely bloody and degrading fury. This torrent of maximum recriminatory mayhem constitutes the epicentre of the narrative, with regard to which the ploys and rhythms of the resented are set in sharp relief. As activated by figures almost otherworldly in their shadowy distance from normal affairs, the blitzkrieg tends to involve on the ground manifest peasant cannon fodder armed with instruments of death—guns, gadgets, trucks, communications—they could never afford with their pay checks. But, true to form, Scott, as inciting McCarthy to do his manic utmost, depicts the agent of the young punk’s demise as another famous pocket of ravenous spleen, namely, aliens, spelled R-u-s-s-i-a-n-s. The representative of this aspect of overdrive is a beautiful blond, Malkina, who hires a compatriot (and his likewise blonde woman associate) to intercept a young courier on a high-powered motorcycle by placing a razor-sharp wire across the two-lane to hell, lurking in the midnight darkness and only at the last moment pouring out the blinding flash of a bank of lights on his truck whereby the prey would lose his ability to divert and instead plunge into the line so sharp as to decapitate him. Moving quickly to shake the boy’s head from his helmet like a round of cheese, the Russians had done nothing so much as to stir a Mexican hornet’s nest from which carnivorous Malkina hoped to reap huge profits—financial and emotional—in connection to which the small supply of cocaine and cash he was transporting amounted to peanuts (peanuts because the-powers-that-be had employed him as a form of payment to his mother who had been arrested in the course of her specialty of being, for them, a contract killer with a piranha’s disposition). We had heard her, typically sarcastic and obscene, tell the lawyer at the prison’s visitors’ room (he being a lawyer who could be described as a counselor, or, as Demy would say, Cassard [a processor of cases]) about to cover the kid’s $400 speeding ticket as conjoined with being found with $4000 in his helmet, “I owe you [and after his smug, “Yes, you do…”] …How about a blow job?” She calls him a smart-ass; and he counters with, “You bring it out in me,” as if the increasing coarseness of his interplay with the cartel and its American investors could otherwise be diverted. As with the Mexican Mom being a lot meaner than she looks(shuffling along arthritically in prison chains), Malkina, is the girlfriend of the counselor’s friend and business partner, Reiner, who relates to the wavering justice professional a level of perversity from her which he can’t shake off. “I’d like to forget about Malkina fucking my car…” During a nocturnal drive across a golf club fairway, they come to a halt and she keeps things going by disposing of her panties, going outside, attaching her clitoris to the windshield and progressing across it “like a bottom feeder sucking its way up the glass.” That shock, of course, would be an echo of unlucky Executive Officer Kane, in Alien, having his glass helmet given a kiss of death by a hot-blooded incarnation from out of that grotty asteroid.
So far we’ve just nibbled at the edges of the peripheral, secondary horrors strutting their stuff in Scott’s remarkably hopped-up deception of a crime story. Now we’ll get down to business in the spirit of Le Doulos, with the few—very few—lives that mean anything at all here (and not quite here), in the form of (the, or simply) Counselor and his lady fair, Laura, a movie name, of course, with the connotation of clocking in and out of the picture. The precious Gotham guys in Laura [1944, when worlds were overtly at odds and Laura Hunt was a far from resolute huntress) are members of a very different galaxy from that which we have here. When first we meet them, Laura and Counselor are trading quips under a white bedsheet in a room with copious, “heavenly” pure white filmy curtains. There is a confessional scene to come, with Malkina getting nowhere trying to boss the priest. But the real revelatory confessional action is in that white room with its coitus; and the real navigational key is one that you could never get Scott to put into direct play for wider reflection. But, be that as it may, we’re to simultaneously measure the figure of Barny, the volatile metaphysician as coquettishly debating with her confessor, Leon Morin, Priest, in the eponymous Jean-Pierre Melville film from 1961. Ignore this point, and you’re at a disadvantage. The exigencies of this crossroad, recall, would have terrified all the cheeky aliens polluting the landscape.
Two matters are to be closely engaged in that opening scene, a visual puzzle and a discursive puzzle. Caressing under those sheets they erect for us a composition conveying to some effect the way their carnal presences are arrayed. As they twist and turn it is hard to see where one ends and where the other begins. That’s a clarification, not a confusion, of life. Counselor and Laura are like billions of others introduced to ecstatic energy, only to go on to careers as slugs. What do they have to say for themselves? She asks, “It’s afternoon. What time is your flight? I haven’t seen you for two weeks, and you’re leaving again?” She rallies by way of Barny-like embrace of audacious flaunting of violating conventional good manners. “I want you to prick me in my trees…It helps to be real, doesn’t it? I want you to touch me down there… I really do! Say it more sexy…”
From there, he’s off to Amsterdam to buy her a wedding ring far above the norm, being, like Father Leon, proud of his being more perceptive, more discerning than his business associates (and thereby a bit of a shit-disturber at heart, even if heavily camouflaged; but lacking the guts to seriously contravene the norm). His gambit at the dealer’s minty stone works consists of body language held hostage to the elevated status of the transaction and, on the other hand, alert to maintaining a full range of action. “I want her to have a diamond she’s not uncomfortable wearing.” Suavely stirring up the elevation, the seller/ connoisseur replies, “She’s probably more daring than you think.” And then, with the Texas lawman quietly savoring a precinct of Old World sheen beckoning to his supposed advanced sensibility, the arbiter of rightness seeks to impart a philosophy of gems which would speak to a problematically advanced modernist. “Remember, we’re not looking for merit. This is a cynical business. We seek only for [that] imperfection” [which makes a dead block of mineral become a mystical treasure]. (Perhaps quite a lot less attractive to Counselor’s ears, but nonetheless important, is the dealer’s phraseology, “A cautionary stone, in the endless nobility of that frailty…We will not thereby be made less…” During the latter stage of the transaction, the features that jump out at us are those moments of the buyer’s pausing to bask in his newly attained entry into a league so exclusive that virtually no one else can imagine its powers. Back in El Paso he’s seen not with the objectof his largesse but with Reiner, with whom he explicitly contemplates elevating his platinum status with the delivery of astronomical profit margins from that drug trade based in Mexico. Reiner warns, “If you pursue this road there could be a surprise and you won’t see it coming.” The presence of discernment in the play of motion, evoked by that pure white bed covering, would be crucial in seeing what is “coming” in the way of dangerous impasse and the way of delight. That form of subliminal energy here revisits the musical thrum so incisive in Scott’s Thelma and Louise; but now we must field a very different, far more divided, level of inspiration coming to pass in The Counselor, an energy drawing forward the eventuation of Leon Morin’s lacking the right stuff, a lacuna particularly partnered with a track record of benevolence toward victims of fate.
A little prelude to the lovers in bed and their hiving, not so impressively, to an uncanny expansiveness comes in the form of a quick glance at that jet-bike snarling along the highway next to their bower of difficult power, with a cluster of wind turbines among the scene. Drive nature crazily? Or follow its lead? The arc of action between Laura and Counselor which follows, additionally comprises the credits and a soundtrack flawed in significant ways. It may not be quite as bad as the French folk virus killing the wooden “jazz” burlesque turn at the Cotton [sheets?] Club in Le Doulos, but its Mexican jingle pitch leaves us with a twangy, half-assed foxiness going nowhere. (This film will subsequently shovel in a bit of rap here and a bit of DJ hip-hop there—all to sterile effect.) When Counselor finally gets around to showing what he bought in Amsterdam, the piano bar ambience (at Reiner’s Grill) is a precious, over-elaborated, tinny tinkle put to shame by the memory of the piano solo being ignored by Silien and Maurice in Le Doulos(and having some kinship with the “cordial” pianist shying away from Jef, the Samourai, in Melville’s Le Samourai).Accordingly, the trite optics and Barny-unlike gameness in Laura’s being there in her latching on to a handsome, wealthy, distinguished intellectual stand as a betrayal of the pristine excitement of that first shot of the bed. Now the full-time scheming protagonist puts on a show of shyness, pat chivalry. “I have something to discuss with you. I’m a bit scared…” Laura, handed this script, reciprocates with similar cliché. “Have you been bad? (Their facial attitudes, in going down this road, show them emotionally injuring themselves and unable to reach so much as a semblance of equilibrium.) He plunges on, whispering, “No… Actually, why don’t I just give you this?” On opening the jewel box, Laura looks nothing so much as a pampered school girl sitting by a Christmas tree in a very expensive house. (You can’t imagine self-critical Barny putting on a creepy show like this.) She makes big eyes, she’s overcome, she laughs, she cries. And her benefactor, grinning very uncomfortably, blurts out, “Don’t leave me hanging!” Then she squeaks out—overcome with the splendor into which her life has been invited— “Yes, I weel…” They laugh, they kiss and the empty piano tinkle comes to the fore. “Try it on,” he urges. He puts the ring on her finger. She nearly breaks down. “Didn’t you know?” she makes (pointless) conversation. “I knew but I was scared,” is his response, culled from reams of “heart-warming” films a million light-years away from the one they’re in. “You are a glory… You are a glorious woman,” is his tribute, more to his own upward mobility than to any convincing focus upon qualities of consciousness in her. Apart from good grooming of her physical assets, what does she do? We never hear. We do hear and see much about Barny’s correspondence school work. What kind of correspondence with the world at large does Laura enact? The supposed magical night of formalities and fundamentals comes to us as decidedly lightweight. “I intend to love you until I die,” is his not very imaginative, not even very literate pronouncement. (Perhaps he’s a contract specialist.) “Me first,” she rushes to say, as if matters of longevity were called for. “Not on your life,” Counselor moves, as if he were in control of their metabolisms. They kiss, the nose of each of them getting in the way; and the public occasion taking over dictates a rather dry run.
Immediately following this getting off on the wrong foot, we have Malkina—clearly not a nine to five sensibility, but clearly self-employed—with Laura at a spa, ostensibly congratulating the happy bride-to-be and wanting to know more about the gloriousness shining down therewith on dusty El Paso. Malkina has a pair of cheetahs which she regards as pretty glorious in their graphic allure and breathtaking speed in overtaking rabbits on the range, cat-and-mousing them (an old trick of Silien, le doulos) and killing them viciously. At the spa she displays an array of cheetah-spot tattoos across her shoulders and back. She, in the course of examining that high-powered, modestly-proportioned and cautionary stone, cat-and-mouses Laura as she overtakes that bearer of bounty and gives her the love-tap, “You really don’t want to know [how much that ring cost], do you? [implying a degree of disinterestedness which Malkina lacks and thereby must trash]. Another provocation in the lady-cheetah’s sightline pertains to Laura’s insisting on a Church wedding. Malkina quips, “So you’re a Church lady?” (That would be tantamount to abrogation of the law of the jungle.) The next step in the dangerous cat’s prowl is to find the young lover’s modern predilection for sensuality while declaring for ancient piety. “Suppose you’ve done something really nasty…” Laura, too trusting to connect the dots tracking to, for her, unimaginable vicious resentment, becomes confused and withdraws her input. On which, the suddenly high-octane alien interlocutor rips off a battle march: “OK, we can change the topic. We’ll talk about my sex life, for example [about which she clearly considers herself a major explorer into a cause of expunging any sense of love from sex; in recounting the pleco gig at the golf course, Reiner concluded, “It was too gynecological to be sexy”]. “You’re teasing,” the Church lady remarks, pleasantly. (Among many other things, this superficially civilized disconnect affords the far from unusual, far from trivial social moment of politicized agenda fanatics and their essentially reactionary, cowardly forcefulness, looking out, with murderous intent, at unwitting [and flaccid] acquaintances.) “Just rattling your cage,” the self-impressed free thinker fires back, not pleasantly, despite the blue-chip smile. Laura is impelled to ask, “You think the world is strange?” “What a world!” is Malkina’s cryptic “yes.”
Her visit to the confessional—incongruity itself—sends a word to the wise that far from everyday evil is in the air. (It also confirms the latent backwardness of that variegated legion of pressure mavens.) “I just wanted to tell someone… What if my sins are unforgivable?” is her approach; and we see thereby that she is less than diamond-hard. She gets brushed off by a self-possessed priest (and in this like Leon, while she falls far short of the potential for maturity of Barny). But she does get out a pithy mouthful along lines of her family. “I was thrown out of the helicopter in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when I was 3. I didn’t know my parents.” As a mid-Atlantic presence, Malkina would be a vessel of not simply Russian carnivorousness but a whole raging stream of European fascistic malignancy. Thus her assistants in provoking the cartel of macho Mexican intimidators (to the point of destroying the love-birds and the other Americanized high rollers, including her boyfriend, Reiner) are distinctly Aryan, a blonde girl and a blonde boy. Malkina’s feint in having them blow their tops about the mascot/ mini-menace whom Counsellor, on hearing that his professional name was The Green Hornet, mistakenly imagined he was some kind of cartoon, cannot escape the pervasive insufficiency of the power-moves. Like a Roadrunner cartoon, the kid hits that sharp wall; and there’s no following scene of him back in business. On that neck hitting that sharp line there are plenty of sparks flying as the jet-bike skips horizontally across the pavement. But the upshot is a wad of flesh splattering on the road in the process of lifting away the petty cash.
What is really noteworthy, though, is that the mid-Atlantic alien always presides over cornball, while thinking herself to be the coolest of the cool. We first see her, dressed, as always, for an episode of Love Boat, overseeing her team of cheetahs as they run down herbivores. That tone-deaf facsimile of deadly conflict becomes even more suspect at the base camp of this sadistic mock-battle on the Texas wasteland—a posh mobile safari bar with lounges, and Reiner pouring her a cocktail. What more could a girl ask for? Well, in fact, a lot more; but touching upon it requires more than faith in Architectural Digest. The dousing in the Atlantic may be apocryphal. But her Eurotrash odiousness fits like a glove and contributes to a critical mass of national diseases providing The Counselor with its extra weight and darkly thrilling heft. The so-called Wireman makes his way to the real cash-prize of this Triple Slam, the sewage truck with 650 kilos of cocaine, bound for Chicago and netting $20 million for each of the investors, Counselor now being one. (The front for this Bonanza is called Desert Star Septic [nice!] and its tag line is “We pump it all” [very nice!].) He and a male sidekick don’t get very far before a couple of the Latino biters, dressed in highway patrol outfits (phoney in the way all the music here is phoney), regain possession of the desert stardom. (Thelma and Louise’s brush with a real traffic patrol officer was far gentler than the attackers here, with their automatic handguns ripping through steel and killing off a passer-by for good measure.)
It doesn’t take the aliens very long to recreate a kind of Alamo, in unwitting tandem with Malkina revising the Cold War. (Temporarily relocating in London, she sneers at a hireling [a young blonde woman having a change of heart refusing to take the pay for her role in having another partner, Westray, garrotted by a bolas device]: “You know what I like about Americans? You can depend upon them…”) Reiner is cat and moused off the highway by an army of 4X4s and shot down like a fleeing rabbit. The cheetahs-on-board are spared by the Mexican wildcats and a gang of children run off with his cool shoes, shades and other props. Westray who (like Neil in Michael Mann’s Heat) tells Counselor, “I can leave all of this in a heartbeat…” is the perfect Alamo fatality, in his white cowboy hat and singing cowboy apparel. (That it is Malkina who hunts him down suggests that, in a heartbeat, her Ivan-the-Terrible instincts could make a deal, perhaps a temporary deal, with the less than impressively perceptive Southerners.) On that rendezvous where he imparts some cautionary smarts to Counselor, Westray also wears a shiner derived from dissing a Mexican doorman. In response to his telling the foot soldier to fuck himself, he remembers hearing the retort, “I’m going to hurt you, White Person…” That his gringo victim boasts about subsequently hiring two killers to dispose of the assailant does not impress us that Westray is tough enough. The considerable presence of burly truckers and the likes sets in relief the prospect of some kind of valuable resilience, crime notwithstanding. But such a mountain of mistuning and Neanderthal antiquity is at its best as giving pause regarding the real hardball on deck here, which no one in sight (as in Le Goulos) has any idea of what it would look like, least of all bloodthirsty Malkina, who, about to emigrate to Hong Kong, gushes to her banker about the sheer ruthlessness of those cheetahs in days of yore, inspiring her to mouth the axiom, a coward’s axiom, “Nothing is worse than a coward.”
With that irrational heat breathing down their neck, Counselor and Laura look to Boise, Idaho, as far enough from the tempest. Wrong again. Laura is intercepted in the El Paso airport parking lot by the omnipresent, omnivorous hunters, she is cat and moused for a while, then decapitated and deposited in a large garbage dump while Counselor—spared to be cat and moused at a platinum level—zooms back to Juarez to present the case to the cartel’s executive that he and she are benignity itself. A long cat and mouse telephone call, directed by one of the chiefs obviously trained by Jesuits, leaves Counselor brushed off like a peasant. Soon after, a DVD, titled, Hola (Hello), appears at his fleabag hotel room and he cries copiously on understanding that the contents star Laura, in the role of a snuff victim. His starring role never comes during the tense last moments. But it will. After stage-managing Westray’s beheading on an affluent London promenade, Malkina (wearing a retro-medieval, Geneviève-style head scarf as if she were hitting on Liberace), dines with her financial advisor at an old-timers, white-tablecloth eatery for those angling for a knighthood. Bringing some kind of a full-circle into view, she discusses with him the advisability of converting her fortune into diamonds, the overriding point being that there is no decisive ridding of her and her ilk.
The self-satisfied tyrant stringing Counselor along presents a sober, confessor attitude; but we, from our perspective within the self-appointed knight’s study/ billiard room can discern that he’s having a good old time squelching a courtroom darling the likes of which he would have been bedevilled by in those hard-knocks affairs he’d decided to go to war about. (Reiner had told his partner-to-be, by way of dissuading him from getting involved with such volatile go-getters, that the cartel has been eager to welcome him into the fold because “…they can sniff out the moral dilemma, the paradox…Yeah, they’re drawn to it. Not sure why… Lacking any moral sense, they’re fascinated by it.” The brain trust having Counselor where he wants him, on a rhetorical firing line, lays down the law to the effect that wavering between effective resolve and self-indulgence touches upon realities that please him a lot, realities unwittingly covered by Reiner’s observation, “They have a real aversion to mixing business with pleasure” [which is to say, an aversion to harmonics, polyphonic].)
The arch-criminal begins his indictment with, “I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you’re in, Counselor. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes is different from the world where the mistakes were made” [which is to say [in one sense], the bid to redress the groundless charge of murdering the Green Hornet and stealing a tanker full of cocaine has been supervened for the sake of a deranged appetite to slaughter a whole group of alien contacts in lieu of discovering the real state of affairs]. (The paradoxical factor here, however, is that the Confessor/ Priest has correctly discerned that Counselor has royally screwed up and no lawyering can right the ship.
Unusual detailing of this collision is apt by reason of the literary distinction of McCarthy’s (and Scott’s) text here—a very rare and valuable plunge into demands upon film viewers. By this point in the experience, most film viewers will have assumed that all the essentials have been covered. But there are factors, of the “nihilistic,” still outstanding, which we need to absorb in order to assess the rat-holes such pests feed upon the better to drive us crazy.
The no-small-problem intones, “You are now at the crossing [that latter term being Thelma’s accomplishment of love; whereas here it resurfaces as the optimal ingredient of a vermin’s hate] and you want to choose. But there is no choosing. There is only acceptance. The choosing was done a long time ago. I don’t mean to offend you. But reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life.” “The realities of life” our verbose sadist wants, in the last analysis, to impart, comprise a rejection of paradoxically transcending classical logic in an only too classical schema of a thought-experiment about all of eventuation vanishing. “In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later come to our life… For those with the understanding that they’re living the last days of the world, death acquires different meaning. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation [generous recognition of mortality] can accomplish. And then all the grand designs, all the grand plans will be finally revealed for what they are” [namely, nothing, a scenario gratifying to gutless losers]. The wordy half-wit, having trotted out his placating his lack of balls by floating a nihilist sunset that excuses itself from fully playing the play that sensual resources know to be never conjured away, only on tap to be enriched or defiled, cuts off the phone torture of Counselor by claiming he has to get down to other calls, equally edifying, no doubt, but probably inconsistent with his death-wish for the entire cosmos.
A few remarks within this intensively complex filmic composition illuminate its war-footing. Under the covers that promise much more than they deliver, wakeful Laura gets off two loaded missives. The first words of the production are, “Are you awake?” Then, a bit later on that site, her urging, “Say it more sexy,” is remarkable for undertaking, however superficially, the almost universally disregarded task of timbre. The diamond expert, whose thematic gifts we’ve already savored, should be recalled for his concept of “cautionary diamond,” so vivaciously embracing the necessary luxury of hardness beyond compare, hardness that includes a virtuoso tour de force of guile and heartfelt charm. (All of which brings to bear that other and less recognized treasure, solitude.) In that vein of something very special, we have the credits, describing the names by way of a font comprising matchstick-like letters shifting deftly to ring out a large complement. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad featured a morose multi-millionaire at a top-of-the-line spa who lived for a game of playing an array of wooden matches to see who gets left with the last counter on the board and thereby feeling like a fool. (The tooth-pick-wooden-match continuously used by the cop in Le Doulos also piggy-backs on that graphic wit.) Westray—far more focused than boozed-up Reiner, delivers a graphic of his own to the effect that the world will never allow even a moment of relentment. “This is a different species, Counselor. They’ll rip out your liver and feed it to the dog. Don’t do it [get into partnership with creatures he [Westray] regrets having met]. I’ve seen it all, Counselor. It’s all shit. All shit.” (He goes on to admit that his persisting with shit pertains to an appetite for a big and expensive supply of women. This motivator leads us to try to figure what makes Counselor tick. A sense that the general run—which he sees at its worst—deserves being ripped off by wonderful soldiers of fortune like himself, who, he imagines, to be smarter than any Mexican and any Russian, if it comes to that? Reiner had quipped, “I always thought a Law degree was a license to steal…” He also declared, “Anyone who thinks he’s the smartest is on his way to a slam.”) When the Malkina-sent shit hits the fan that advisor in the Buffalo Bill outfit tells the injudicious Counselor, “You count on a friend, someone who’ll die for you… You don’t have any friends…” Malkina enthuses with the London banker about her dedication to those cheetahs gone forever. “I miss watching them killing rabbits at 75 mph… The hunter has purity and distinction. What they do is kill. It’s our weakness to want something else…” The Surrealist “more” embarrasses her in ways she’ll never know; but her butchering tendencies therewith leave her a formidable pest. If she had a marching song it would be a polka. She leaves us with, “I’m famished!”
The Counselor cautions against such tasteless gobbling. And it vigorously delineates the monstrosity in store for those, like Barny, eliciting cogent, even if nebulous, harmonics. Barny would, however, choose to laugh off the Italian Occupation and largely ignore a subsequent German Occupation. No such blitheness can be tolerated for very long in face of the ravenous Occupation not requiring a declaration of war.
Cynical, nihilistic? I suppose. Riveting, fascinating, and at times contemplative. This is Ridley Scott’s best film in many years. You’ve done a marvelous job sorting it all out and beyond that, drawing your singular connections to the works of Melville.
Thanks very much, Dwayne!
The twosome of cynical and nihilistic coming to pass in Scott’s work is varied in absorbing ways. From out of a thrust in Alien, the films paint a hard core of skittish and encrusted venom having claimed historical sensibility. Accordingly, the films picture a mainstream horrifically wrong and not amenable to significant righting. It is that dominant constituency which comes to be seen as a nihilistic hotbed of settling for sham. (The drug kingpin’s speech at the end of The Counselor is a remarkably literary disclosure of self-satisfied humbug.)
I love how Linklater, in Everybody Wants Some!! constructs the knife edge of youthful intensity with all the equipment to right the ship, but most likely to let it sink.
Sorry for misspelling your name, Duane!!
OK, I will admit I am not a huge fan of the film, but neither I have ever attempted to invest the kid of scholarship you have done here Jim, and review is passionate, committed and wholly spectacular. There were patches of brilliance in the dialogue and I do see the LE DOULOS connection. For sure Javier Bardem gives one of his finest performances, and the film is intricate and challenging. Extraordinary essay here Jim!
Thanks, Sam!
This is indeed an intricate and challenging work, the Cormac McCarthy screenplay darkening the skies in special ways. In an era of auteurs disappearing at a frightening rate, you have, I think, to give Scott some credit for daring to annoy his tone-poem constituency.
I’m having that same feeling toward Richard Linklater and his great but off-putting Everybody Wants Some!! The apparent need for the coattails of Dazed and Confused has made a long-shot even longer! Like the Counselor (and Black Hawk Down, for that matter) Everybody Wants Some!! does not trade in charming baby fat—too many players have crossed the line and the real gamers are few and feeble. (The Counselor’s gamers being actually in other movies!!)