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Written by Pete Timmermann Thursday, 24 October 2013 19:13

You never really believe or care about what’s going on here.

It seems hard to believe just how few movie adaptations have been made from novelist Cormac McCarthy’s books, given that he’s one of the best-respected modern writers (whose stature only seems to rise with each passing year), and his books are inherently cinematic. Up until the 2007 release of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men really broke him into the mind of the modern moviegoer, the only filmed adaptation of his work was 2000’s subpar All the Pretty Horses. Since No Country, though (and aided by the increased visibility his 2006 novel The Road brought him), the film projects have been coming a little quicker; James Franco just finished his adaptation of McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God, we got The Road in theatres a mere three years after the book came out, etc. But now, with Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, we have a film from the first proper screenplay McCarthy has written — he has published one stage play before (The Sunset Limited), but has never written a screenplay until now, including of the aforementioned adaptations of his work.

Looking beyond the screenplay, it isn’t hard to see that a lot of our best and brightest filmmakers are scrabbling to work with McCarthy at this, their first good opportunity. Ridley Scott aside, the cast is knockout-level, including many of our best current actors: Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt (who got his break in Scott’s Thelma & Louise), Javier Bardem (who is of course best known in America for playing the villain in No Country, in a performance that won him an Oscar), Penélope Cruz (who was in All the Pretty Horses), etc. The problem, though, is that I’m not sure any of these people are terribly well suited to working with McCarthy. The film bears his unmistakable authorial marks, but Scott is too glossy a filmmaker and the actors generally too literal-minded to really bring the story to life.

And the story itself is simple enough: Michael Fassbender plays a lawyer in El Paso who gets engaged to the beautiful and sweet Laura (Cruz) early in the film, needs more money, and dips his toes into drug trafficking, which he is not well suited for. Pitt and Bardem play enablers on Fassbender’s journey, and Cameron Diaz turns up as Malkina, Bardem’s character’s girlfriend, and who also really seems to be pulling the strings. There’s enough violence along the way to please fans of McCarthy’s rougher books, like Blood Meridian, but the bottom line is that there’s sheen where there should be grit, the dialogue sounds false coming from these actors’ mouths, and you never really believe or care about what’s going on here.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t good scenes, there aren’t good lines of dialogue, there’s no fun to be had here. There are and there is. In the long run, I’d go so far as to say that The Counselor is an above-average movie, if only by a little. But that’s the problem; for a movie with this much talent behind it to be just a shade above mediocre is a pretty big missed opportunity indeed. | Pete Timmermann