Retrospective Review: 'The Counselor': A Worthy Successor To 'No Country For Old Men'
“You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist. But for those with the understanding that they're living the last days of the world, death acquires a different meaning. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. And then, all the grand designs and all the grand plans will be finally exposed and revealed for what they are.”
Jefe (Ruben Blades) -The Counselor
Control is something we as humans aspire and hope to obtain. We’d like to think that we have free will and that through the awareness of this concept, that there is a way of managing and improving our lives. There is an essence of truth to this idea. However, the biggest misconception regarding the nature of free will always go back to the much larger lack of control we hold over our lives. One part of this all goes back to the undeniable reality encompassing our birth and how we had no agency in deciding that. Andy Warhol stated that “Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery,” and although not many people would approach existence in this manner, the lack of control from the circumstantial matters that encompass a cosmos that preceded us ultimately showcases how little control we truly have when taking charge and assuming some manner of agency.
Ridley’s Scott’s filmography has explored these similar themes, as have the literary works of Cormac McCarthy, whose most popular novel, “No Country For Old Men” tackled the existential despair and angst that came with contemplating the utter lack of control we are faced with when confronting a cycle of unrelenting violence that continues to escalate beyond any sense of order or control we can assign it. ‘The Counselor’, which was also written by Cormac McCarthy as a screenplay, explores a terrain through the arrogance of a character who thinks that they can fix all the damage that led them down a dark path. But much like other McCarthy works, there was no undoing the mistakes that sowed the seeds of their own demise.
No Country For Old Men’s Lewlynn Moss (Josh Brolin) believed in such a fallacy when he lifted a case full of money from a cartel drug deal gone bad. He believed he could fight off the very forces of violence his actions triggered, whether this involved members of the Mexican cartel or the unstoppable force that was Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Michael Fassbender’s The Counselor, as he’s even referred to as opposed to an actual name, is very similar and equally arrogant in his belief that by simply stepping out of the normalcy of his world as a lawyer and temporarily embedding himself with the monstrous entities of the Mexican cartel, that somehow he can come out clean or implore a rational means to undoing the kind of damage these same forces don’t address as anything bordering on human rationality.
In a mini review (really a tweet) filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said that The Counselor was "a meditation of the illusory nature of normalcy and the devastation to come.” Plenty of the characters, both major and minor, within the existentially meta world that Cormac McCarthy crafted embody this element through their overall acceptance or utter denial of a reality that is in a constant state of change where the idea of establishing a sense of order or structure following the mistakes or mishaps they failed to comprehend becomes nothing other than an impossibility that will merely laugh at them once the final blow has been dealt.
Very much like the unrelentingly hostile environment of No Country For Old Men, The Counselor can be seen as a descendant cousin of a story that pretty much illustrated that there is no stopping what’s coming, which is something that Barry Corbin’s Ellis told Sherrif Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) near the end of the film "What you got ain't nothin' new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.” This same breed of vanity is The Counselor’s major flaw, and it is illustrated to the same extent he speaks with a character known as Jefe (Ruben Blades). After having lost the woman he loves Laura (Penelope Cruz) and having his deal with the devil ( the cartel) crash to a point where any attempts at repairing it are mere acts of futility in the eyes of the cosmos he believed he could control, he calls Jefe, a man who from a basic surface level look, is the man who put him in touch with what he deluded himself into thinking was a one time deal. Interestingly enough, Jefe rises beyond the drug connection archetype most films either write off in more simplistic fashion to that of a philosophical avatar for the indifferently chaotic world Cormac McCarthy’s works have always succeeded in conveying as he dishes out the brutal truth many of his characters fail to understand or avoid from the fear of facing the uncertainty once the violence has demonstrated itself in all its naked and unforgiving fashion.
“I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you're in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago…"
Not long after this scene, the full scope of The Counselor’s punishment has been dished out and the only survivor of this horrid world turns out to be Cameron Diaz’s Malkina. In what proves to be the most unconventional and prolific performance of Cameron Diaz’s career, the character of Malkina embodies a predatory nature that this film’s themes convey. This is demonstrated through her voluptuous hunger ranging from her love of luxury, her self-awareness regarding the cold nature of the cosmos and the change it thrusts upon us, and even her perplexity on the innocence that Penelope Cruz’s Laura lives on when she tells her that her world is strange to her, as opposed to the world overall in its many mysteries carries an otherworldly nature that can’t be identified as human. This is clearly a reference to the oblivious innocence that a person like Laura is unfamiliar with as opposed to the survivalist mentality that characterizes a femme fatale like Malkina who commands pet leopards as if they were champion dogs, is drenched in leopard styled tattoos, and spews truths so cold and direct that they make her bizarre moment where she has sex with a car (Yes that happened) not completely outside the type of character she embodies. And that is further rooted in the very primal honesty that defines the themes and reality of The Counselor and the incredible cast that manage to add an extra layer of ethical introspection in a story that in many ways carries its own sense of awareness in that it is a story about something much deeper, transcending, and even hauntingly revealing about the human condition and all the contradictions that have enabled its own self-destruction in spite of the obvious warnings staring back at it.