It was Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince who declared: “It’s a little lonely in the desert.” That’s a notion writer Cormac McCarthy knows well, his later novels often taking place in dusty Western locales among those isolated from society. But what’s also even more true in McCarthy’s work is what the snake replies to the Little Prince: “It is also lonely among men.” McCarthy’s characters look for meaning and completion in others, occasionally find it, but ultimately find humanity at large — and often themselves — to be too self-centered and deeply flawed to overcome the fundamental solitude of existence.
That’s certainly true in The Counselor, McCarthy’s first produced screenplay written directly for the big screen. The pulpy story — at its core a fairly simple one of a drug deal gone horribly awry for a newbie to North American drug trafficking — gives the author ample opportunity to explore the notion that given the opportunity to allow our inherent greed to run rampant, there’s little that can save us from the consequences of our own worst inclinations.
Michael Fassbender plays that newbie, the unnamed Texas attorney referred to in the movie’s title. He’s a man who, judging by the Bentley he drives and the impressive diamond he purchases at the start of the film to propose to Laura (Penelope Cruz), is doing pretty well for himself. But he’s also a man of enormous appetites, and despite finally meeting a woman capable of getting him to abandon his womanizing past, his lust for money isn’t so easily quelled.
So he finds his way into a multimillion-dollar drug deal with his old pal Reiner (Javier Bardem, for the second time sporting a ludicrous haircut in a McCarthy adaptation), and Reiner’s liaison with contacts on the Mexican side of the trade, Westray (played with sleazy pragmatism by Brad Pitt). The self-confident air that presumably aids the counselor in the courtroom belies a deep naivete about the realities of the venture he’s embarking on. And when things go wrong, they go very, very wrong.
It’s a work filled to overflowing with subtext and thoughtful, if bleak, ruminations on our true natures — on the inescapability of evil, the pointlessness of grief, the finality of death. Why, then, does Ridley Scott’s film of the material — despite an immersive central performance from Fassbender, and McCarthy’s towering talent for arranging words like meticulous and austere flower arrangements — ultimately feel so empty?