Marlow Meets Conrad in Scott & McCarthy’s The Counselor
A counselor/lawyer wants to make a lot of money very
quickly, and maybe some of his criminal clients can help. He invests in a drug
smuggling venture across the Tex/Mex border, but it goes badly wrong. That is all the plot you need to
know, because the plot is entirely secondary in this film. The motor that drives this story is
moral logic, not narrative, and once it starts ticking it will not stop until
it reaches its deadly climax. We are told this early on in the
film, but do we recognize the anecdote’s significance? We are given no back-story or
narrative exposition, so we have to pay close attention and gather any possible
clues or signposts not knowing if they are part of the machinery. Anton Chekhov once advised a young
playwright "If in Act I
you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act". There is an armoury full of
narrative pistols here, and we do
not know which are loaded with blanks and which with nickel-plated
bullets. But we find out.
One character knowingly misquotes from Kit Marlow’s Jew
of Malta:
That was in another country;
and besides the wench is dead. If we connect with
the original quote these words they will reverberate chillingly later. Marlow also wrote ‘There is a
point, to which when men aspire, they tumble headlong down. (Edward II) and ‘Why, this is hell,
nor am I out of it.’ (Dr Faustus). And that is also a good plot summary .
McCarthy
once wrote “I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he
thinks I am.” It seems some critics think he has written a stupid script
here, and that Scott has filmed it with equal inanity. Well most of them didn't
like Blade Runner either. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, is about
drugs and greed and consequences.
So is The Counselor, but McCarthy wasn't going to write about
them in the same way twice.
McCarthy
may be the Josef Conrad of our time. Like Conrad he looks into the heart of
darkness. He knows the deadly
seduction of greed. He recognizes
the banality of evil, and he knows that banality should not reduce the
terror. The Counselor, like Verloc
in Conrad’s Secret Agent, thinks he can work with evil, profit from it –
and survive. And consider
these words;
“He
walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the
absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate
earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The
crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals
trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world
and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
Is
it Conrad or McCarthy? In
fact they come from McCarthy’s The Road, but they
could be in The Heart of Darkness. McCarthy has also written
“These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or
nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing
beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. (Blood Meridian).
“Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision
I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always
some choice I'd made before it.” And
“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” (Both from All the Pretty Horses).
These themes run like obsidian threads through most of
McCarthy’s work. The themes may be
constant, but he is always looking for new ways to plait them and he will not
give us what we expect.
One
critic actually called this film a
crime caper. You will not
understand how wide of the mark that is until you see the film. Some reviewers excuse McCarthy by saying that ‘he has never written
a film script before and so it is understandable that doesn’t really know how
to do it’. But
this is a McCarthy script so it will not be like other scripts. The Road was not like
any other post-apocalyptic novel or film, and No Country for Old Men was also
distinctive. What we
remember about that film is the implacable evil embodied in Chugar, as played
by Javier Bardem. Bardem is
cast here again, but his character
is absolutely not Chugar, and the evil gravity sucking the plot and the
Counselor inexorably downwards does not lie within him. The faceless cartel is the black
hole. No light escapes its
pull. At the end of No
County
a lawman is defeated, not physically, but morally. He can no longer face the darkness. In this film another lawman, the lawyer
rather than a sheriff, is also
defeated by the dark powers, but he is a more willing victim.
So here we
have Ridley Scott directing a Cormac McCarthy original script, with Michael
Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad
Pitt. The expectations are
high and the critics are widely divided. Many of them are deeply disappointed. Yet others are exhilarated
by this film’s refusal to play the standard narrative beats, to wink at us,
keep letting us in on the plot, to give us a hero. We are given no release from
the inexorable, implacable, pitiless consequences and when the violence comes
it is extreme and utterly thrill free.
None of the
actors try to win us over.
Fassbender’s Counselor is smart and greedy and stupid. He will not
listen to the people who know what they are talking about. He is vain enough to think
they are his friends. His only
redeeming quality is his new found love, Laura, but the quality of that love is
only discovered too late.
Bardem’s character is
blinded by his success (and maybe his shirt) and fascinated by the
feline beauty and power of his girlfriend, in which role Cameron Diaz does
something new – and I do not mean the notorious ‘sex with a Ferrari
wind-screen’
scene. No; in this
film Diaz is frightening, and I have not seen that before. Brad Pitt dons his
Thelma & Louise Stetson but puts aside his charm. He is smart, but not the smartest. Penelope Cruz, as Laura has the least to do, because
she is the film’s only innocent, but her beauty alone is enough to justify the
crucial role her existence plays in the film.
Major and minor characters spout cod
philosophy about life and death and crime and punishment, and it is cod
philosophy because they are not philosophers. McCarthy is, but his message is not spoken here, it is
shown. He has always loved
using words and images, writing for the stage and screen as well as novels. Some think his vision is
nihilistic, bleak and hopeless, nd of course The Road and No Country reinforce that
opinion. But maybe his humanity is
that of the surgeon who has to cut deep into our bowels to reveal the
cancer. If we deny its
existence it will kill us.
And sometimes it does. We
must never ignore that possibility.
But we have to find ways to live with this knowledge.
Do
not be misled by the marketing.
This is not a crime caper or a thriller. I think this is a fine film, wonderfully written,
filmed and performed. It
compliments us by asking us to do some work, and it does so with serious intent. Ridley Scott is a serious artist, and
so is Cormac McCarthy.
I cannot wait to see it again, to pick up what I missed the first time
round.
