“I have no wish to
paint the world in colors more somber than those it wears but as the world
gives way to darkness it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss the
understanding that the world is in fact oneself. It is a thing which you have
created, no more, no less. And when you cease to be so will the world.”
When making the press rounds for
their Oscar winning turn in No Country
for Old Men, the Coen brothers repeated a joke explaining the only
necessary work they did in order to prepare Cormac McCarthy’s novel for the big
screen was to “add quotation marks.”
Indeed, even given the high level of skill the two brothers possess, much
of the strength of the film can be attributed to the source material and its
gripping prose. For unexplained reasons the infamously tepid writer has
recently decided to participate in the act of writing screenplays and allow for
his source material to be interpreted by others. However, it seems almost a
necessity that McCarthy would participate in the film business in his own
fashion with little regard for the already established rules. With The Counselor, McCarthy has fabricated
not a screenplay, but a novella of sorts that emulates the best of his novels.
Gone are the standards of formatting for characters or description of scenes
and their headings and in their place long descriptions of organic western
scenery and uncomfortably dark character motivations amidst beautifully omniscient
and often confusing dialog from mysterious characters.
McCarthy develops a simple central dilemma as he places the titular character of the counselor in a position where he must continue down a corrupt path and risk danger or seek a more comfortable life in order to preserve a newfound love. As simple and affectionate the power of love is on the counselor, the powers of evil in this world that McCarthy is so excellent at portraying is ever present and uncomfortably realistic. The counselor finds himself among friends and enemies who become interchangeable at the drop of a hat as he struggles to find out just how much power his position really holds in the world. At the same time that the counselor is the central figure of the story, his own problems are trivialized by the emptiness of the world. The fate of each character in the story is potentially spelled out to them and the audience and yet there seems to be a developed trajectory that could never be broken regardless, making us question whether any effort should have been put in the first place. With The Counselor¸ McCarthy rings a chord against the baseness of humanity with striking truth and he spares little expense at revealing this with highly sexual and violent content both in the form of words and actions. Indeed it is almost a shame that most people will never experience the beautifully flowing prose through a written format and rather only hear the dialog spoken on screen.
