REVIEW - THE COUNSELLOR

As glossy as its cinematography and as glassy-eyed as its attitude to its own plentiful philosophising, Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy's anaemic collaboration is like a Much Ado About Nothing for the modern age, only stricter in its looseness, more serious about its flippancy. It concerns a drip of a leading man, 'the counsellor', apparently only confident when the person opposite him is an incarcerated 5-foot woman handcuffed to the table. He's getting involved in something illegal, I think, then something goes wrong, though it's never made clear precisely what. Some people will come looking for him, I think, though it's not made clear precisely whom, at least not initially. McCarthy's script treats narrative details as trivialities, and esoteric existential moralising as prime dramatic meat. In a crime thriller. It treats women as sexual objects, and Ridley Scott assists in basking in the luridness like he's directing a porno, so it's to Penelope Cruz's credit that she bequeaths her role with something approaching depth. Cameron Diaz's attains hers by sheer screentime; as the film runs on, she and Brad Pitt begin to assume primary interest in the plot, which threatens to actually become interesting. It's the dank desolation of Michael Fassbender's counsellor, stripped bare by film's end, and the inevitability of what becomes of these people right from the first scene, that neatly wards off anything of that sort. Scott and editor Pietro Scalia seem in a rush to get through McCarthy's dense screenplay, which brings the film down to a perhaps more easily palatable runtime, whereas I might have preferred a more luxuriant runtime, wherein McCarthy's dialogue is given the space and gravitas it thirsts for. Diaz in particular could have done with fine tuning her performance - she seems not intelligent enough to grasp the subtleties in her melodramatic prose, yet too intelligent to neglect its obvious campiness. Fassbender can't do dull and dreary, nor a Texan accent - he fares better when pushed to his limits, which dutifully occurs. McCarthy has written a brave, subversive script, both misunderstood by Scott and yet brought to sizzling life by him.