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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/18/2013 : 12:47:40
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This is a film for adults. All the kiddy-karping I've heard and read about not being able to follow the story, or writer Cormac McCarthy being past it, or Ridley Scott having lost it ... such comments are from children, I don't care if they're a 100 years old.
While watching, I kept flashing on Pinter territory. Never mind No Country for Old Men, here's No Country For Anyone! And yet, we all live there.
Maybe the most arresting question the film asks is - in an age of acquisition, how far would you go, how much would you sacrifice for the one you love?
Scott presents us with juxtapositions which are nearly poetic - which, I guess, is what reminded me of Pinter. So we have a very erotic sequence [mostly hidden under sheets that might just be shrouds] - and we learn we're in a room of love and not just lust.
Interposed with the deepening of this love are scenes of people whose livelihoods involve waste disposal and shit cleaning. And drug smuggling.
Interposed with those scenes are both verbal and visual descriptions of ingenious assassinations by well-paid professionals.
And these scenes of brutality sit alongside lives in the dirt and lives in unimaginable luxury in several countries - countries in which financial transactions are conducted in cyberspace with sanitized clean hands, as well as in all-too quid-pro-quo squalor with very dirty fingernails.
Even from his Bladerunner days, Scott's been able to present such cultural opposites and unite them into a story.
Here, the mechanism is the lover from the first sequence. He has no name. He is The Counsellor. Ironically, he's the one in most desperate need of counsel.
And it's provided, both bluntly and enigmatically, by as strange a series of satellites as McCarthy can concoct. You'll hear, no doubt, about a woman who fucks a car, baffling and bewitching her sometime lover. This couple could never be the two under the sheets, though one of them might just need a shroud before the tale is told.
She, as played coolly and in total command by Cameron Diaz, is not just a woman fucking a car. She's both seducing and seduced by our age of acquisition. McCarthy knows this as well as J.G. Ballard.
And, yes, there are some more interposings - these are the quasi-literary conversations between various pairs of the characters. Another Pinter-reminiscent touch. More extended versions of the unexpected dialogue between baddies in Pulp Fiction - but deliberately more pretentious and not quite so witty.
But these are not just killing-time conversations. They are warnings. And they presage a process of making choices. Moral choices.
So, here's the thread: a nameless but highly successful lawyer, besotted in love from his top to his toes, chooses to risk what he holds dear morally in order to gain financially, and let's see whether he wins or loses. Michael Fassbinder nails this guy to perfection - he's smart, he's naive, he's bamboozled, he's trusting, he's pushed to his very limits.
Along the way we see him at work on a prison visit with a client [Rosie Perez] who asks for his help with her bad-boy son; we see him negotiating [the tool, after all, of a lawyer] with a diamond seller [Bruno Ganz] for a gem to seal his love; we see him sort of negotiating with a dodgy deal fixer [Javier Bardem], a middle-man quite comfy in his delusions of power; we see him taking instruction from another dodgy deal fixer [Brad Pitt], who also believes he's got a fool-proof plan. Most of all, we see him being manipulated in ways he cannot begin to know by a global operator [Diaz].
These are powerful paradigms. Powerful forces whose destinies surprise themselves most of all.
If you can leave your inner child at home - the one who'll want to keep whispering that you explain this or that - well, it's you who'll be surprised. And intrigued.
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The Counsellor
