JAVIER BARDEM AND CAMERON DIAZ IN THE COUNSELOR

Scott shoots a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, with a star cast

The Counselor is a glitzy, glamorous Ridley Scott movie whose screenplay was written by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is a marvelous writer of fiction but he has not ever done a screenplay. His works have been adapted well by others, especially when the Coen brothers filmed No Country for Old Men. In The Counselor McCarthy seems to be stretching very thin material with his signature droll dialogue and some lengthy riffs on stuff not directly related to the action, too much of which happens out of sight and without thorough explanation.

Obviousy there is a drug cartel -- Cartel being perhaps wisely the French title of this film. "Counselor" means lawyer. Not everybody is well aware of that. Michael Fassbender is a lawyer. He somehow gets mixed up in the affairs of a cartel. So does Javier Bardem. Fassbender falls madely in love with Penelope Cruz. Who she is I don't quite know. Bardem is mixed up with Cameron Diaz. He seems to be rich and crooked. She is richer and crookeder, but the details are mostly lacking, except that he both works for her and has sex with her. Brad Pitt is a slick wise guy with a slow drawl and a succession of western outfits; he advises Fassbender to watch out. Indeed he might. The drug deal goes wrong. And then, some of the principals of the tale must die, even though their involvement in the deal's failure seems purely coincidental. That's about all I can tell you about the plot. I can tell you a lot about the sets, the locations, the costumes, the hair styles, the drinks.

Especially since the action is so much offstage, there is great reliance on McCarthy's dialogue, which includes elaborate fatalistic pronouncements, like ""We announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives." Or statements like "To see quarry killed with elegance is moving to me." But the power of the fantastic dialogue by McCarthy in the Coens' No Country for Old Men arises from the fact that it occurs as delay or punctuation of genuinely tense moments, not simply as pronouncements.

Most of the action takes place in America near the Mexican border. Some of it also takes place in Ciudad Juarez, Amsterdam, London, Chicago, and Boise. There is some shooting along the road. There is some nasty business with wires, differently placed, but in each case designed for decapitation.

Mike D'Angelo's dissenting views always interest me but his explanations of the things he likes so much about The counselor don't make much sense to me this time. I do understand his saying, "I'd happily watch it again right now for the sheer pleasure of the badinage, which I find it hard to believe the haters can't appreciate on any level." Surely one must always appreciate the superiority of Cormac McCarthy's "bandinage." It's also interesting that he thinks Cameron Diaz too over-the-top as the shiny silver-nailed, spot-tattooed, cheetah-owning vagina dentata drug queen Malkina. He's probably right that Angelina Jolie would be better and Charlize Theron better still. He points out that Diaz's masturbation-on-the-car-windshield scene was only described, not seen, in the original script, and that would be better even if it would rob the film of its chief talking point. Cormac McCarthy's fiction is full of action -- sometimes more than any film can handle. Why does he leave so much out of his screenplay?

I think D'Angelo also loved Soderbergh's (to me) empty exercise Haywire, in which the director said he set out to do "a Pam Grier movie made by Alfred Hitchcock." I like the idea of a director shooting his own kind of films in his own ways. LIkewise D'Angelo starts his (uncommissioned and doubtless heartfelt) Letterbox review, "Recipe for a movie that'll piss people off: Jacobean + Euclidean + Hegelian," and I can't see the point of recipes to piss people off. (I'm also not sure D'Angelo's having studied scriptwriting did him all that much good as a critic.) Perhaps Cormac McCarthy was in some sense following a recipe, for writing a snappy screenplay. Of course I loved Jim Jarmusch's chilly, breathtakingly hip The Limits of Control , which nobody else liked. Ridley Scott deserves full credit for filming a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, even if it does not satisfy. And this film may assume some sort of cult status. I can see watching it again some time too, relishing the dialogue and some of the scenes. If the trailer doesn't make you want to watch it, you're crazy.

The Counselor opened in the US 25 Oct. 2013; UK, 15 Nov. I recommend Katey Rich's very good "First Look" review in the Guardian, as well as D'Angelo's.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.