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Jul. 6th, 2014 12:54 amFinally saw The Counselor.
Didn't really see why it's ill-regarded. Diaz was surprisingly unterrible. Maybe not ideal, but her actor-y loathesomeness wasn't a bad fit for the character's. Taking the place belonging to someone better is a different sort of mindless hunger, but the family resemblance sufficed.
I can see misogyny hackles going up, and mine twitched - McCarthy's at least in a minefield, though presumably he couldn't care less. But his readers will see that he's attempting a she-Chigurh (not a she-Judge, since she doesn't get much eloquence). The sucking sea-life bit isn't quite about women luring and destroying males, given the context, since all three of the unlucky drug dealers admit that women are the only things they're finally after. Hence Bardem's "almost" when asked whether he was turned off by Diaz' revelation: his gawking was the same thing on the other side of the glass. And Cruz and Fassbender balance each other, both in terms of desire (mouth meeting mouth, no?) and risking their own lives to stay together (a.k.a. all that stupid dawdling). We also get the female American con artist throwing back the money near the end when she realizes she's been involved in murder. The Kid-like ethical hesitation that Diaz associates with Americans is the only non-hunger force apparently operative, and exists in both genders, if only as the sick look on Breaking Bad's Hank's face upon realizing what a life can be worth in Colombia. And that Colombia can travel.
So presumably merely the sort of misogyny that misanthropy can be misread as when it's not careful what order it attacks people in, a not uncommon P.R. failing of misanthropes, since they couldn't care less. Probably that's what people really disliked, that the bleak ending they predicted for this sort of protagonist got generalized out to the rest of us. All deal drugs and no deserts are just. Expecting an upscale Reservoir Dogs we instead get a violent remake of The Trial.
Without even The Trial's amount of closure! But who needed it? We didn't need to see Fassbender's end the same way he didn't need to see Cruz'. The knowledge that it was sure to was enough to end the story. Not facing that is the "American" thing to do, of course - maybe the chief difference between unpleasant This and as-unpleasant but widely-loved No Country is that here we're not just being slapped but being slapped a second time for failing to know it. And everyone knows when they're slapped twice.
Not a masterpiece, mostly because an audience's realizing that a movie plot won't be going the way it should isn't quite the same as a person's realizing her life won't be ending as vaguely as projected. If you're going to have form itself be allegorical you need to have some really inspired handling of tone to keep eyes off the awkwardness. Whereas instead our eyes are on a lot of people speaking in languages or accents not their own, or otherwise performing well out of their comfort zone, probably including McCarthy. I actually thought things worked best when he let people talk McCarthyspeak, but either his version of ordinary film dialogue or the mixture of the two contributed to the disconnect. And while Fassbender's relative poker-face may have made his eventual cracking more effective, it didn't help us bond with him when we needed to (nor did the TMI first scene). And given that the point of the movie is that he can never actually do anything, and perhaps never meaningfully did, we don't get much of the situational bonding that attaches us even to villains when we accompany them second by second through choices and consequences. Maybe McCarthy assumed the film would be simply too painful if we became attached? Quite possibly true, but that unwatchable film would at least have been a film. This falls apart into moments.
Which is a shame because the scheme is solid. The paradox that there is no law for those who break the law and they instead go directly to Hobbes has been handled well in movies before, e.g. Miller's Crossing, but having the realization that you're beyond laws coincide with realizing there have never been any, that's pretty amazing. And bringing that out through a negative (in both senses) version of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound antiplot! And quite possibly knowingly so, given the Keats and Marlowe/Eliot quotes. If it could have been made to work at all it would have worked great. Perhaps with the Coens? Or Lynch, though to the extent it could fit his worldview he already made this movie twice.
Didn't really see why it's ill-regarded. Diaz was surprisingly unterrible. Maybe not ideal, but her actor-y loathesomeness wasn't a bad fit for the character's. Taking the place belonging to someone better is a different sort of mindless hunger, but the family resemblance sufficed.
I can see misogyny hackles going up, and mine twitched - McCarthy's at least in a minefield, though presumably he couldn't care less. But his readers will see that he's attempting a she-Chigurh (not a she-Judge, since she doesn't get much eloquence). The sucking sea-life bit isn't quite about women luring and destroying males, given the context, since all three of the unlucky drug dealers admit that women are the only things they're finally after. Hence Bardem's "almost" when asked whether he was turned off by Diaz' revelation: his gawking was the same thing on the other side of the glass. And Cruz and Fassbender balance each other, both in terms of desire (mouth meeting mouth, no?) and risking their own lives to stay together (a.k.a. all that stupid dawdling). We also get the female American con artist throwing back the money near the end when she realizes she's been involved in murder. The Kid-like ethical hesitation that Diaz associates with Americans is the only non-hunger force apparently operative, and exists in both genders, if only as the sick look on Breaking Bad's Hank's face upon realizing what a life can be worth in Colombia. And that Colombia can travel.
So presumably merely the sort of misogyny that misanthropy can be misread as when it's not careful what order it attacks people in, a not uncommon P.R. failing of misanthropes, since they couldn't care less. Probably that's what people really disliked, that the bleak ending they predicted for this sort of protagonist got generalized out to the rest of us. All deal drugs and no deserts are just. Expecting an upscale Reservoir Dogs we instead get a violent remake of The Trial.
Without even The Trial's amount of closure! But who needed it? We didn't need to see Fassbender's end the same way he didn't need to see Cruz'. The knowledge that it was sure to was enough to end the story. Not facing that is the "American" thing to do, of course - maybe the chief difference between unpleasant This and as-unpleasant but widely-loved No Country is that here we're not just being slapped but being slapped a second time for failing to know it. And everyone knows when they're slapped twice.
Not a masterpiece, mostly because an audience's realizing that a movie plot won't be going the way it should isn't quite the same as a person's realizing her life won't be ending as vaguely as projected. If you're going to have form itself be allegorical you need to have some really inspired handling of tone to keep eyes off the awkwardness. Whereas instead our eyes are on a lot of people speaking in languages or accents not their own, or otherwise performing well out of their comfort zone, probably including McCarthy. I actually thought things worked best when he let people talk McCarthyspeak, but either his version of ordinary film dialogue or the mixture of the two contributed to the disconnect. And while Fassbender's relative poker-face may have made his eventual cracking more effective, it didn't help us bond with him when we needed to (nor did the TMI first scene). And given that the point of the movie is that he can never actually do anything, and perhaps never meaningfully did, we don't get much of the situational bonding that attaches us even to villains when we accompany them second by second through choices and consequences. Maybe McCarthy assumed the film would be simply too painful if we became attached? Quite possibly true, but that unwatchable film would at least have been a film. This falls apart into moments.
Which is a shame because the scheme is solid. The paradox that there is no law for those who break the law and they instead go directly to Hobbes has been handled well in movies before, e.g. Miller's Crossing, but having the realization that you're beyond laws coincide with realizing there have never been any, that's pretty amazing. And bringing that out through a negative (in both senses) version of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound antiplot! And quite possibly knowingly so, given the Keats and Marlowe/Eliot quotes. If it could have been made to work at all it would have worked great. Perhaps with the Coens? Or Lynch, though to the extent it could fit his worldview he already made this movie twice.
