Elegant Huntress, Nietzschean Warnings — The Counselor

If you think you've seen this tale before, think again.

DEPTH: 4

ACTING: 4

PLOT: 5

ORIGINALITY: 4

PRODUCTION: 5

ENTERTAINMENT: 5

DEMAND ON VIEWER: Moderate to High (extended dialogue featuring complex poetically styled sentences of Cormac McCarthy; judging by the comments posted to the Ridley Scott interview below, this artfulness was lost on some viewers. Very violent and disturbing images, including beheadings, not suitable for the young or impressionable.)

OVERALL: Recommended

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This film is a joining forces of two names of wide achievement: Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy. Scott's films include Alien, Promethius, Black Hawk Down, and Blade Runner.

McCarthy's books include The Road, No Country for Old Men, Child of God, The Passenger, and All the Pretty Horses

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"Most Novelists Are Desperate To Do What I Do" — NYT Magazine Interviews Ridley Scott

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Cormac McCarthy's official site and works

The pretext for Counselor is a story about a lawyer involved in a drug deal gone bad. But a deeper tale is told here, one about the arrogance of the 1% rich male, whose casual callous bravado is shown as stupidity, and whose sense of control is a complete illusion. (How they got to be 1% is another matter; for some it is financial bullying, others hard machismo, and others a leechy sloth, playing off other people's wealth. The men in this film seem to combine all of these lovely traits.)

Fassbender. Pitt. Bardem. Diaz. Cruz. An all-star cast, and they each do their job well. Bardem and Pitt especially play off previous roles to misdirect the viewer. These are all strong men, and yet they are, one by one, made weak and brought down by a woman who loves to hunt.

The "Counselor" turns out to be the one who needs counsel, and he gets it elegantly from several sources. A diamond-seller (Bruno Ganz), referring cryptically to a gem as cautionary, says, "Why do we adorn beauty? Because we know it is fragile, and yet we also know that this fragility is noble." 

What is this overconfident lawyer to do when he is in trouble? He is already past that crossroads, he is told by a philosophical drug lord (Ruben Blades), and cannot go back and recreate the world that existed prior to his choices. "When you know that your reality must die," he offers, "your view of death changes."

The end is a surprise, because of its quietness, and lack of the usual Hollywood showdown. There is enough fighting, gore, and shoot-em-up to go around, but after so many of the don't-know-when-to-quit variety action films recently, I expected a crescendo rather than a diminuendo to the finish.

The end is also indirect, another welcome change to the usual storytelling methods. There is a CD, but what is on it? The viewer is left to work that out (to its fairly horrible conclusion), but this can only be done if close attention has been paid to the dialogue.

There is a tale here of female ascendancy. The Cleopatra-like eyes of the villain-

anti-hero remind one of the horus-eye, the all-seeing glyph of ancient Egypt, and its corresponding tigress imagery reveals that Mexican cartels and headless bodies are only one way that a cold and calculating, all-seeing eye can wreak revenge. 

Importantly, this tigress also does it with sex. She masters her male victims and slowly strangles them in their own nets. The trip wire is a repeated visual, though used for much more sinister purposes here. People are beheaded and strangled, blood spurting. But far before that, she had already attached herself and wound her way around them. She does the same to the viewer. We at first take her for a bimbo, a party-favor, part of the poolside show. She fucks a car; Fassbender asks, "Why are you telling me this?" Bardem doesn't even know, but he knows he is scared by her. He describes her against the windshield of his car as some sort of sea animal, with suction. This is not simply a circus act. It is what she does.

Is she some sort of avatar for all those who have been taken advantage of by those with power and status? Is she an incarnation of the unholy impulse for revenge? A prophecy of retributive justice against the stupidity of the patriarchal system that includes priests, kings, lawyers, and the doe-eyed women who prop them up? Or simply an acknowledgment of a primal (sexual) urge within all of us for the hunt, something that we as humans never fully escaped from our evolutionary past?

Sam Spruell (tough-as-nails criminal, the one who springs the trip-wire), Bruno Ganz (who played Adolf Hitler in Downfall) and Ruben Blades (reminiscent of the Godfather) all deserve mention for turning in fantastic performances in supporting roles. Without them this film would be less than half of what it is. They give the film its philosophical heft and visceral power; they bring to life Cormac McCarthy's poetry and imagery.

Friedrich Nietzche

Counselor is said to be Nietzchean and nihilistic. It is true that the characters' viewpoints are amoral, and McCarthy's work clearly trends that direction. (Unlike so many movies lately with trite titles such as "Into Darkness," this one really is about the darkness, and about our greed and the choice to enter that darkness.) 

How To Pronounce Nietzsche...

Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra are meditations on what it might mean to honestly re-create our values as human beings. What must be rejected and destroyed, in order to get there? This is more than mere negation of value; it is the encouragement of honest engagement with our values. 

Perhaps we do not have to do the destroying; those who choose the path of darkness will destroy their own. Ultimately we are spared the brutal dire consequences that the characters in the film face. We are left to walk out of the theater, out of the story, to re-enter a world of our own choices, seeing that they still lie before us. In this sense Nietzche still speaks to us through films and stories like Counselor. Can we hear what is being said, or do we ignore it and go about our business? Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott at any rate seem to be saying, take heed.

OSCAR PICK — Best Picture — Moneyball

Don't be fooled by the title. This is not really a story about money or even baseball. Nor is it merely about Brad Pitt being a likable cock (though that type truly belongs to him like it used to belong to Robert Redford.) This is a subtle story about finding out who you really are, along with the battles, losses, humiliations, and ultimately the peace of finally coming to terms with yourself.

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View Pitt interview with clips on Charlie Rose

Depth: 5
Acting: 4.5
Plot: 5
Originality: 5
Entertainment: 5
Demand on Viewer: Mild-Moderate


Overall: Highly Recommended

A relevant and timely premise: what to do about making due? With little resources, and against the establishment belief that the Oakland Athletics are all but a minor league farm team, General Manager Billy Beane (Pitt) is compelled by a passion for baseball and winning to redraw the map. He recruits a shy, pudgy Yale-graduated economist named Peter Brand (played very skillfully by Jonah Hill, whose amusing stoic face is a nice foil for Pitt). Together they pour over the statistical data in hopes of understanding how to maximize his lower-tier recruits. He fields a team of individuals who cannot hit or field as well as any single player recruited by wealthier teams such as New York or Boston. Beane expects that as an aggregate they can beat the odds (a bit like predicting overall traffic patterns in a city without knowing what any individual driver may do.)

So far sounds like a snoozer—something for only "backwards-K" scoring junkies—but be reassured, the film skillfully avoids becoming top-heavy with stats. Indeed, this is one of Moneyball's most remarkable qualities, that it lifts out of this potentially boring subject a deep and lively story about human choices, with plenty of good solid competitive sport sprinkled in for fun. Credit goes to director Bennett Miller and the author of the book on which the movie is based, Michael Lewis.

Start with passion: the gravitational pull of the old way requires a healthy dose of it. Beane has plenty, and it comes out in endearing and idiosyncratic ways: shoving twinkies and popcorn down his throat between phone calls, clicking the game on and off as he pays attention from a distance, wheeling his truck around empty lots trying to clear his head. The most interesting form his passion takes is in the scenes with other people, as he tries to cajole, reason, push, and joke his way around them. A memorable example comes in a locker-room display, when the team, shocked into silence, hears Beane say, "THAT is what losing sounds like."

The opening draft meeting rings true immediately, as a group of seasoned older men tut-tut Beane. Having been in this position myself frequently as a pastor (dreaded "council meetings"), I recognize a universal archetype here: the individual against the (older) institution. There are human tensions created by that relationship that cross all businesses, organizations, and causes. Near the end of the film another team owner expresses this sentiment very powerfully. That dialogue is worth the price of the film, and watching through to that moment promises to be very satisfying.

Against this backdrop and giving the story its profound originality is Beane's relationship to his daughter. He has made choices in his past based on money; now he must come to a different place. The way the film interweaves his own history in baseball with his decisions about his daughter is truly unique. Here is an archetype: a man reflects on past failures and realizes who he is. No tearful scenes, but for those men who recognize their own story, there may be moist eyes.

The performances by Pitt and Hoffman (A's coach Art Howe) are good, though not among their best partly because they have set the bar so high previously. Fortunately they both have the maturity and gravitas to carry off the roles. The movie does suffer a little from their notoriety: one keeps thinking, "That's not Billy Beane, that's Brad Pitt!" However, without their names on the cover, the story might have suffered what the Oakland A's did: de facto relegation to the minors because of lower visibility.

I recommend this film particularly for anyone in a position of leadership or management (the way Beane has to climb all the way down the ladder and understand his players is instructive), and anyone trying to navigate the sometimes impossible straits of family vs. career. Several metaphors, including an especially vivid about one trying to get past first base, highlight these themes in a way everyone can understand and relate to.

Moneyball has moreover something very salient to say to a culture obsessed with both money and sports. As we follow Beane's story, we are led to face several truths about money. It needs to be understood and reckoned with as a controlling force, but ultimately we are free to choose beyond it. Money and sports are only the tip of the iceberg. What does any of this mean? is Billy Beane's question, and one we could benefit from asking more often.