I think I liked The Counselor? I mean, I can’t very well explain it, but I was never bored and always compelled to find out what happened next. I even watched the extended cut on the Blu-ray. Hey, it was a holiday weekend, why not? I can’t compare it to the theatrical cut because I didn’t have time to watch it twice, but this review addresses the version with 20 extra minutes. If it contradicts anything from a hypothetical review of the shorter cut, so be it.
Technically, The Counselor is about a lawyer, referred to only as Counselor (Michael Fassbender). He is in love with and ready to propose to Laura (Penelope Cruz), but he gets involved with the drug dealer Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Reiner’s wild girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz). Yet The Counselor isn’t so much about what happens between these characters, and only slightly about how it happens. Perhaps most importantly, The Counselor is simply about that it happens at all.
Like I said, I watched two hours and 15 minutes of The Counselor, I paid attention to every scene, but I couldn’t recap exactly what the deal was and how it goes down. I mean, I know this genre so I get the gist, but you sort of just see things introduced and they gradually become part of the story later. Like the extended motorcycle trap setup. It’s a cool sequence in itself, and it later dawns on the viewer how it relates to Counselor, and even later why it’s really bad news for him.
I could say I was captivated by the characters so it was a character study, but it’s not really. I actually didn’t give a damn about any of the characters, and thought Malkina in particular was pushing too hard to be a Cormac McCarthy character. One of her first lines is in response to saying something Reiner feels is cold, and she says, “Truth has no temperature.” Get it? Because cold was a metaphor for her emotions, and she’s spinning it back to remove emotions from honesty!
Fortunately most of the dialogue isn’t that flashy, even when Reiner recalls sex stories, so it’s not the banter that kept me going, although the banter is vague enough to make you wonder how it’s even moving the threadbare plot forward. New characters are introduced at an hour and 50 minutes in (possibly only 90 minutes into the theatrical cut but still), and not even to be that significant. It’s just these are characters for this scene at this late point in the story.
I feel safe calling The Counselor a tone piece. I definitely wasn’t interested in the possible meaning behind it, so I’d like to assume there wasn’t supposed to be any. Otherwise it would be a failure. Yet it’s amazing how McCarthy, director Ridley Scott and the performers were able to have compelling scenes be about nothing. There is a plot we’re all familiar with, so perhaps they all felt they didn’t need to rehash the details again, so they just played around in the in between scenes. Really, there’s nothing especially original about a story where illegal activity doesn’t pay off the way you hoped, but people will keep doing it, they’ll keep telling stories about it and this kind of tone piece is an interesting way to get there.
Many of the individual scenes are extremely compelling, though probably not the ones that are blatantly intended to be. The splits on the windshield? Whatever. On the other hand, cheetahs crawling around an SUV interior is not something you always get to see. The action is really well staged, and since it mostly involves side characters who aren’t the stars of the movie, you really don’t know how it’s going to turn out. No one’s favored to survive those exchanges.
The real extras are on the extended cut. An immersive experience features Ridley Scott’s audio commentary with featurettes interspersed through the movie. The featurettes add about an hour to the running time and this is the only way you can hear Scott’s commentary. The featurettes are incorporated fairly seamlessly, and you can watch them separately too. They’re all fairly basic talking heads plus behind the scenes footage, but the cast makes a valiant attempt to explain their characters, and you may be interested to hear how Scott compares The Counselor to Thelma & Louise, Matchstick Men and A Good Year.
The theatrical cut disc has three viral featurettes that are essentially short additional scenes with characters from the film. They’re cool standalone scenes with very Cormac McCarthy rhythm. Judging by the Counselor and Malkina/Reiner scenes they are prequels to the movie so I assume the Laura scene is a prequel too. These were released online to promote the film in October, but they are presented in full Blu-ray quality here.
That’s about as close as I can come to describing The Counselor. More specifics would be spoilers, and probably not really help you get what you’re in for too. I think the critical community did a fine job alluding to the weirdness inherent in The Counselor so I feel I’ve done my part to contribute on the home video side. One more thing. It should be Michael Fassbender IS The Counselor, right?
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
