The Counselor

It’s ultimately difficult to know just what to make of The Counselor, as the film, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy, boasts (or suffers from) an avant-garde sensibility that’s reflected in its heavily stylized dialogue, absence of wholeheartedly compelling characters, and erratic, utterly unconventional plotting. (In terms of the latter, it’s quite possible to sit through the entire film and still have no earthly idea what it’s actually about.) The breadth of Scott and McCarthy’s off-kilter approach just can’t be understated, ultimately, and there’s little doubt that The Counselor is destined to alienate as many viewers as it pleases – with the efforts of a fine cast, including Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt, generally crushed beneath the weight of the movie’s pervasive art-house atmosphere. It’s interesting to note that the meandering nature of the opening half hour, which is devoted primarily to the colorful characters’ bizarre, almost laughably random conversations and monologues, is representative of everything that follows, as McCarthy, his disdain for conventional elements palpable, has suffused the entirety of the proceedings with a similarly off-the-wall feel that wreaks havoc on its momentum and, for the most part, prevents the viewer from connecting to the material in any real way. The Counselor‘s extremely mild success, then, is due mostly to its refreshingly oddball take on a (relatively) familiar subject matter and the sporadic inclusion of breathtakingly striking images and interludes, with, for example, a flashback to Diaz’s randy escapades atop a car and an almost astonishingly brutal character death ranking high on the film’s list of mesmerizing moments. The end result is as idiosyncratic and unorthodox a mainstream release as one can easily recall, and it’s not difficult, certainly, to envision large swaths of the moviegoing public rejecting The Counselor outright.

**1/2 out of ****