Legal bender

In Ridley Scott’s latest, The Counselor, Michael Fassbender plays a lawyer who doesn’t have a clue; he goes through the movie with a vacant look, asking for increasingly oblique and metaphoric advice from a series of veteran international actors (Bruno Ganz, Rubén Blades) as he tries to undo a bad situation involving drug dealers operating at the US-Mexico border.

The fact that the Counselor (the only name Fassbender’s character is given in the movie) has to keep seeking counsel from others is part of the movie’s warped sense of humor. It’s a very dark comedy written by Cormac McCarthy, a comedy so dark that it’s not even remotely funny.

Yet you can see traces of life’s absurdity peeking around the edges. Javier Bardem’s hair and wardrobe, for instance. Bardem plays Reiner, the Counselor’s client and business partner. With his finger-in-the-light-socket hair, retro sunnies and God-knows-what shiny clothes, Bardem provides the movie’s comic relief, even when he’s describing a mechanical device with a steel alloy that, when looped around the neck, can cut through a person’s carotid artery in seconds.

Perhaps a bit more campy humor is provided by Malkina (Cameron Diaz), Reiner’s girlfriend whose demeanor is summed up by her feline eyeliner and cheetah tattoos covering her shoulder and torso. Yup: she’s a maneater. Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up!

The Counselor marshals together an A-Team of talent, yet it’s difficult to figure out whom the film is meant for. It is resolutely dark, decked out in McCarthy’s patented labyrinthine monologues and stream of consciousness asides. When adapted from his novels, such as the Coen brothers did with No Country For Old Men, that style can be tempered, parsed and made quite filmable. But The Counselor was written directly for the screen, and it contains seasoned actors spouting some of the most wacko dialogue ever uttered on film. This stuff may sound nice and literary on the page, but on the screen, it’s a guaranteed hoot.

Metaphors fly and collide mid-air in McCarthy’s wordy script, from a scene where the Counselor purchases an engagement ring for his sweetie Laura (Penelope Cruz) from Ganz, and they discuss a diamond’s lasting “authority,” to the scene where Diaz goes to a priest’s confession box to talk about the nature of sin. (If the many counselors in this movie were being billed by the hour, they would be raking it in.)

Perhaps the most memorable metaphor turns up in a scene where Reiner, for no particular reason, tells the Counselor how his girl Malkina once effed his Ferrari out in the desert one night. Literally straddled the windshield and started grinding against it with her Brazilian. “It was like one of those catfish things, you know, one of those bottom feeders you see going up the side of the aquarium sucking its way up the glass. It was… hallucinatory. You see a thing like that, it changes you forever…”

Watching The Counselor can have that effect on people.

In truth, you either have to hop aboard this Ridley-Cormac Loonytown Express Train or you’ll get left behind on the platform, holding your luggage, mouth agape. ‘Cuz they’re not going to change the route for anybody.

Not since Oliver Stone shot his lurid hallucination U-Turn with Sean Penn, or Norman Mailer tried to film his own pulpy Tough Guys Don’t Dance has there been such a bananas literary mash-up onscreen. So you just have to decide whether you want to take the ride or not.

It’s clear from the git-go — Bardem and Diaz out running her pet cheetahs on a desert plain, stalking bunny rabbits — that this is meant to be pulpy fun, not high literary art. The A-list actors have a good time rocking this stuff out, mostly playing it straight. It’s hard, when the dialogue consists of stuff like this:

MALKINA: I don’t think I miss things. I think to miss something is to hope that it will come back, but it’s not coming back.

REINER: You don’t think that’s a bit cold?

MALKINA: The truth has no temperature.

As for the acting: Fassbender starts out with a slight El Paso Texas twang, but quickly abandons it; Cruz plays the sweet, innocent girlfriend who may have stumbled in from a different movie. Rosie Perez has a neat little turn as the Counselor’s former client, now behind bars. (She offers Fassbender oral gratification to pay off a debt of $400. Fassbender retorts, “Then you’d still owe me  $380.”)

Bardem is just there to fill in the colors of each scene he’s in, a human livewire with bristling hair and bug eyes. God bless him. (He’s actually more restrained than he was in Skyfall). Brad Pitt is the ponytailed Westray, the guy putting together a $20 million drug deal with Reiner and the Counselor. He gets to say enigmatic things like, “Maybe I should tell you what Mickey Rourke told what’s his face.” And then he never does.

At times, watching The Counselor, you feel the hallucinatory grip of McCarthy’s bizarro world, and you think: perhaps if they did take it all a little less seriously, adding just a few drams of humor here and there, then — but, no, it still would be a hot mess.

The script gives us ample opportunity to explore McCarthy’s psyche. You thought The Road was dark? It doesn’t hold a candle to The Counselor. The movie’s prevailing view of women is that they are mysterious and dangerous and predatory, not unlike Diaz’s amoral, cheetah-obsessed Malkina; if not, they are witless victims, like Cruz. This is typical noir signposting. (Malkina might actually be the female equivalent to Anton Chigurh.)

And once again, McCarthy and director Scott explore their fascination with interesting methods of killing people (for previous examples, see Alien, No Country For Old Men, etc.). Beheadings are especially popular, as one motorcyclist gets clipped by a baddie called The Wireman. Another character loses his head as well as his fingers, and when you’re done going “Ewww!” you remember: oh yeah, Ridley Scott did direct Hannibal.