The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy’s much-anticipated screen-writing
debut paints an elusive, eccentric, exquisitely rendered picture of poetic
pain. Filled with bizarre, bone-grinding violence, twisted characters,
confusion and moral compromise, Ridley Scott’s movie becomes a sodden, sordid
cautionary tale of good and—mostly—evil. If you were looking forward to the
crime thriller—more Tony
than Ridley—the film’s trailer
seems bent on promoting, The Counselor
is not it.
Michael Fassbender heads a burning hot all-star cast, all outshined,
hover, by the pulpy, lyrical, hardboiled and hell-bound script, a foray into
the mesmerizing and merciless milieu of corrosive drug trade on the
American-Mexican border—a barrier as moral as it is geographical for much of
American fiction. McCarthy and Scott enter a closed, dangerous, elite world,
devoid of any ordinary people to act as gateways or guides for the audience or
to remind us of a reality beyond the brutal one of the cartel.
