The Counselor

Changing media is a tricky thing.  History is filled with artists who could not sculpt, musicians who could not write an opera, and writers who could not compose a decent poem.  There is no shame in that; nobody, with I suppose the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci, is good at everything.

So, imagine an 80 year old writer who is in the running for the title of greatest living American novelist. But, for reasons unknown, he really wants to write a screenplay for a movie.  A big Hollywood movie.  Maybe that is the explanation; maybe screenplays for big Hollywood movies pay more than novels.  (Ya think?)  Maybe this 80 year old novelist has some big debts and really wants a big payday.  But, more probably, he has always just wanted to write a screenplay.  So he does.  OK, let’s drop the faux-anonymity.  The author is Cormac McCarthy.  I love Cormac McCarthy. 

He writes the screenplay.  Then it gets even better.  He gets a Major Hollywood Director: Ridley Scott.  He gets a Superstar cast: Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt.  Wow.  What could go wrong?

I finally got around to watching it.  The Counselor is an absolutely terrible movie.  OK, “absolutely terrible” isn’t right; it is much worse than that.  Words cannot express how unbelievably, really unbelievably, disappointingly awful this movie was.  All those stars are trying their best, but it is just a disaster as a movie.  And, sadly, there is absolutely no doubt where the problem lies.  The screenplay is bad, really bad.  It just isn’t a screenplay; it seems like the sort of thing someone who is a novelist would think is a screenplay.  After seeing the movie I thought that maybe there was a novel lurking under there somewhere and somebody needed to take that novel and write a real screenplay based on the novel. Maybe that would work.  But, like a novelist who just doesn’t understand poetry, McCarthy just doesn’t understand that writing for a movie script is not the same as writing a novel.

Fortunately, lest this review turn into a trashing of McCarthy, the screenplay has been published and I read it.  I should have followed my general rule and read the book before seeing the movie, but in this case, I figured that since the movie was the real object and the printed screenplay is secondary, I should reverse the normal order.

From the screenplay, I can now see what McCarthy was trying to do.  He should have just written a novel.  I think it would have been a good novel.  In fact, in some ways, he did write  novel—the descriptions of the movie scenes which don’t have dialogue, and the descriptions of the settings for the assorted scenes read just like descriptions in a McCarthy novel.  In fact take away the bits indicating the speaker and much of the dialogue here could be straight out of a McCarthy novel.  In fact, I have just decided that I will henceforth consider this book The Counselor: A Screenplay to be the name of a novel on which an absolutely horrible movie was based.  That makes me feel better.

Why does the novel work better than the movie?  For one thing, there are some parts that are vastly more comprehensible in the novel.  There is, for example a scene in the novel in which a woman from whom the Counselor (no name—he is just the Counselor) borrows a phone.  In the movie, that is all the woman does—lends him a phone.  In the novel—she is subsequently kidnapped.  That second scene is crucial for explaining how these same abductors know to kidnap the Counselor’s fiancée—he called her on that phone.   There are lots of little details like that in the novel—things that take scenes which leave the movie viewer saying, “How did the characters know to do that?” or “What are they doing?” and, you know, explain them.  My favorite example (favorite as in, an example that surely belongs in the Hall of Fame of Bizarre Movie Directions): in the final scene (and this isn’t ruining anything because a) you aren’t going to watch this movie if you are sane and b) it wouldn't make any sense if you just watched the movie anyway), Malkina (Cameron Diaz) is descried as being dressed this way:

She is dressed in an ankle-length black pleated skirt, a dark green bolero jacket with black braiding.  She wears a heavy graduated swag choke necklace of emeralds with matching earrings.  She is about five months pregnant, just noticeable.

Read that last line again.  Now, remember that is a description from a screenplay.  Fast-forward to being the movie viewer—you are supposed to notice that this woman is pregnant—barely noticeably pregnant, no less.  Without that bit of information much of the story in this movie makes no sense; with that bit of information, a lot snaps into focus.  So, next time you are watching a movie, be sure to try to figure out if an actress walking across a restaurant is meant to be barely noticeably pregnant.

The same thing happens when the Counselor wanders through a crowd in Mexico, by the way.  In the written text, we are told what this crowd is—and it is important what this crowd is and why the Counselor is there. In the movie, he just pushes his way through the crowd for no apparent reason.

Another example?  OK, I’ll stop—this is like shooting fish in a barrel.  It’s a terrible movie.

But, the novel.  I promised to get back to that.  In the novel there is an interesting question being explored.   The world you live in is a world which has been made up of previous choices you have made.  You may not have intended to create the world in which you live, but you did create it.  Once you find yourself in your current world, you will often find yourself at a crossroad, but it is not the crossroad you want.  You want the crossroad to be whether you have to live in this world you created or not.  You want to decide whether you have to endure the consequences of your previous actions.  But that is not the crossroad you are at.  You have no choice.  You might give everything to avoid the consequences of your previous actions, but you cannot change your previous actions.  You are at a crossroad, but it is only the crossroad of deciding whether you will accept the fact that you have created this world you did not want or whether you refuse to accept the fact that you cannot change the world you created by your previous actions. 

But, it gets worse.  It is not simply that you must endure the pain of knowing that the world you created is painful because of things you have done.  You make decisions now and then later on you are faced with other decisions you did not see coming at all.  Decisions you would rather not make, but now you have to make them.  You are operating in a blind.

But, it gets worse.  There are other people out there who are also making decisions.  And some of those people do not have the moral scruples which you have.  And in a world in which those with moral scruples, no matter how small those scruples may be, meet those without moral scruples, the latter will win.

Like all of Cormac McCarthy's work, this novel has a deeply moral core.  We go through life trying to skirt the edges of being moral.  We think we can commit a small sin here or there and that it won’t really matter.  But every time we commit those small sins, those small violations of our moral code, we create a new world in which we must live with the consequences of those past violations of our moral code.  One violation of your moral code leads to new choices and you cannot escape those new choices.  And once you are down that road, there is no going back.  Along that road you will meet people who do not have the same limits as you, and when you meet them, you will not like the results of all those previous choices you made.

And right now, you are thinking this is all a overblown.  You are thinking that just because I make this small decision now, I will not end up with my world destroyed.    

The hunter has a purity of heart that exists nowhere else.  I think he is not defined so much by what he has come to be as by all that he has escaped being.  You can make no distinction between what he is and what he does.  And what he does is kill.  We of course are another matter.  I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen.  Ill-formed and ill-prepared.  We would like to draw a veil over all that blood and terror.  That have brought us to this place.  It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in doing so it makes of it our destiny.  Perhaps you would not agree.  I don’t know.  But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.

If you think this is overblown, you have just closed your eyes.  Don’t act surprised when you cannot undo your prior actions because you don’t like the results.