The smallest crumb can devour us.
Cormac McCarthy believes so strongly in the danger of our crumbs that he’s warned us twice: the first time in his novel, “Blood Meridian,” and the second time in his screenplay, “The Counselor,” which was released by Vintage Books on Oct. 15.
The actual movie comes out next week. If director Ridley Scott stays true to what McCarthy wrote, “The Counselor” looks to be one of the most poetic and savage movies of the year. Its violence will turn your stomach and its sex will induce abstinence in ways church groups could only dream of.
But McCarthy has always had a knack for finding the most valuable of truths in humanity’s darkest recesses. In that way his screenplay, which reads like a dialogue-heavy novella, is no different from his other fiction.
McCarthy’s lead, known only as “counselor,” does a job for Mexican drug lords. It’s supposed to be a one-off deal that sets up him, his new fiancé, and a few of his friends for the good life. It doesn’t work out that way, as you might guess. The counselor’s story is straight tragedy, more Globe Theatre than Hollywood.
When the curtain raises, we find the counselor in bed with soon-to-be fiancé, Laura, played by Penélope Cruz. They talk about the counselor’s past sexual encounters with women. The counselor says that, during, they always exclaim “Oh my God” or “Jesus Christ” – “always something religious like that.” They talk about how funny this is, but by the end of the scene Cruz gasps religiously with the rest of them.
McCarthy uses sex in “The Counselor” similarly to how he uses violence in “Blood Meridian,” that is, he uses it as an image for our connection to redemption and the divine. “Life is being in bed with you,” the counselor tells Laura. “Everything else is just waiting.” Divine imagery accompanies sex wherever it appears in the story –– no matter what deranged way it makes that appearance. At one point, Laura is even called “Angel”, with a capital “a.”
This wouldn’t be a McCarthy story without violence. And there is violence.
The drug cartels seem to have a fetish for beheadings. They do it often in this movie. Creatively.
Javier Bardem’s character, who resembles Robert Downey Jr. circa 1999, explains for the counselor one particularly clever, battery-powered gadget used for beheading poor schmucks in crowded city streets. Called a bolito, it later returns in the flesh. I mean that literally.
McCarthy, like in most of his work, here depicts humanity at its worst. Whether the burning poetry of his prose will translate to the silver screen, I can’t say. But it is certainly there. No living writer, and certainly no screenwriter, can make murder sing like McCarthy.
But lots of movies like to monologue about the human condition, right? Not like they do in “The Counselor.” Brad Pitt’s character, Westray, is of course the one who quotes “Blood Meridian.” Then he quotes Goethe. In German. And describes the line as “really Plato on wheels.” These things just don’t happen in most movies.
“I won’t flesh out the argument,” Westray tells the counselor in that same conversation, “but the only thing ultimately worth your concern is the anguish of your fellow passengers on this hellbound train.”
The dialogue is as McCarthy as anything else he’s written. What’s the last movie you saw that used the word “purloined”? This is not your standard Hollywood blockbuster.
The gems of McCarthy’s screenplay might be polished, but are they worth slogging through the rest of the movie to get them? I’m not sure. McCarthy has never glorified the horrifying actions of his characters. Bad people are bad, and bad things exists. McCarthy poses the question, “How do we cope with them?”
That said, battery-powered decapitation machines make for difficult reading. What he says about sex is unrelenting and even worse. So what about viewing? A good litmus test: if you love “Breaking Bad,” you will, if not love, appreciate “The Counselor”.
It is a tragedy about consequences. In fact, we never see, or even hear about, what exactly the counselor’s involvement with the drug cartels was. That’s not important, McCarthy tells us.
“I would urge you to see the truth of your situation, Counselor,” a character named Jefe says. “That is my advice. It is not for me to say what you should have done. Or not done. I only know that the world in which you seek to undo your mistakes is not the world in which they were made.”
Everyone makes mistakes. After we do, to paraphrase another movie, it’s what we do that defines us.
How will we define “The Counselor”? Next week we’ll see a moral tale that gets lost in its own depravity or a human tragedy filled with unsettling truth.
Either way, don’t buy popcorn.
