The circle is as wide as it will ever be.
The insectile roar of the motor tears through the world, winds around it like a noose, diamond hard and unyielding.
The circle begins to close, a deathful loop retracting inward.
This is the path the motorcyclist takes—
A screenplay written by Cormac McCarthy, one of the most astoundingly gifted novelists in modern American literature. Directed by Ridley Scott, one of the best mercenary visual stylists in the last fifty years of pop cinema. With this volcanic pedigree, and coming just six years after the Coen brothers’ adaptation of McCarthy’s existential southwestern-noir No Country for Old Men became a critical and commercial hit, expectations regarding The Counselor were dizzyingly high upon its release in 2013.
Then people saw it.
No Country for Old Men was a taut, minimalist thriller stretched tight around a small but powerful nucleus of McCarthy’s philosophical musing on the nature of fate and chance. The Counselor announced itself as that film’s apocalyptic inverse: well past two hours long (in the superior director’s cut form), only very sporadically thrilling with regard to any expected action or chase sequences, suffused with a dreamy, marrow-sick sense of all-pervasive doom that somehow exists alongside the candied, glassy visuals of a world defined by decadent avarice (and the fetid corpsebloat and shit slurry just beneath its foundations), and—above all else—composed of extraordinarily long conversation scenes in which its alternately dazed and depraved characters grapple with the meanings of the world in which they find themselves.
All that miasmic horror is draped loose over the core of an exceedingly simple plot: the Counselor (Michael Fassbender), Westray (Brad Pitt), and Reiner (Javier Bardem) invest in a drug deal; Reiner’s duplicitous girlfriend, Malkina (Cameron Diaz), attempts to steal the drugs; the cartel involved kills everyone except Malkina, who escapes with Westray’s money.
The critic Mark Kermode called it one of the worst films of 2013, while Andrew O’Hehir called it “the worst [film] ever made by people this talented.” Missed in that discourse, however, is how much of what is hated about The Counselor is intentional by design, as it is most assiduously not a film crafted to be a lean crackerjack thriller into which the occasional philosophic wind blows, nor is it meant to be an accurate portrayal of the U.S.–Mexican drug trade.
Instead, it is Cormac McCarthy’s viciously unsettling morality play about a thoroughly stupid man unable to define his world or to understand the world as it is defined to him, who becomes trapped within consequences that honeycomb around him in a hell of (and study into) causal determinism, all of which is blood-smeared across a desert landscape of drug cartels and ravenous greed. It is neither a noir thriller, nor a cowboy noir, nor a crime film at all; rather, The Counselor is Cormac McCarthy’s soap opera of the Grand Guignol.
—as he burns a circle of scorched and brimstoned black rubber upon the arterial tangle of beltways that interlock around the city of El Paso, winding ever so slightly inward with each loop, closing in on the city itself, on the stories the city contains that all knit into one, closing in on all the people trapped within that story whose lives will be taken with its telling and its completion.
The circle grows tighter.
Surface streets now, the bike chewing the road at speeds beyond speeds, at numbers beyond mileage: 203. 204. 205. 206. Later, a man who is not yet dead but whose specific death is so inevitable that it already exists (it has always existed, and will exist until this world ends), he mutters that 206 is a number so high that isn’t a speed, it’s a time of day.
The motorcyclist moves in blurs and noise, the scream of his engine a kind of perverse motor encircling all, a force of fate itself, body and machine moving in tandem to undo all that is planned and to cause all that will be undone, the world he speeds through already disappearing into—
“It’s two o’clock,” whispers Laura (Penélope Cruz), giving the time of day to the Counselor in a voice syrup-thick with sleep and sex. In the distance, out the open bedroom window that’s encased within a dancing parenthesis of death-white curtains, the buzzing whine of a motorcycle, the motorcycle, unsettles the tarbrush landscape and arid rain shadow of the Chihuahuan Desert that surrounds outer El Paso. The couple ignores it, too flush from the thrall of their bodies and their love and their sex, rolling beneath bedsheets with a pillow talk equal parts hyperliterate (“You have the most luscious pussy in all of Christiandom”) and earthy (“I want you to finger-fuck me . . . I want you to stick your finger up me and find my spot and push on it”). In a film that vomits horrors both cosmic and human onto the screen for the near entirety of its two-and-a-half-hour running time, this is one of two lone moments of purity and sweetness, these lovers draped in sheets so as to resemble the ghosts they’ll doom themselves to become. “Life is being in bed with you,” the Counselor whispers. “Everything else is just waiting.” Later, when the Counselor proposes to Laura, he promises to love her until she dies. “Me first,” she replies.
This is the first we see of them. The last will be in a garbage landfill outside of Ciudad Juárez, where a bulldozer will scrape Laura’s headless and defiled corpse off the ground and dump her broken remains into an abyssal pit of human waste, while the Counselor screams eternal in a sweat-greased single room of some godforgotten Mexican flophouse.
“It’s not that you’re going down, Counselor,” Westray warns the unnamed titular lawyer at some point between those first and final events. “It’s what you’re taking down with you.” Westray, all honky-tonk flash and Texas-gentleman style, is a player in the world of Mexican drug cartels, investing in mule operations that export cocaine from south of the border into the United States. He is one of many in this film who will warn the Counselor not to buy into an upcoming deal, cautioning that he is unprepared for the world he plans to invest in and receive a 4,000% payout. Westray vividly details the terrible cosmology of the cartels, a world beyond hedonism and hate, a world where men with too much money and too little humanity pay incalculable sums to remove the heads of women and children and film themselves fucking the still-bleeding bodies. Even further, Westray will ask the Counselor curiously if he’s ever seen a snuff film, noting that “the consumer of the product is essential to its production. You cannot watch without being accessory to a murder.” He suggests this not just as warning that there is nothing the cartel men are incapable of, but also as damnation—that the Counselor cannot live in this world without being a part of it. In a universe as cruel and leather black as The Counselor’s, Westray’s warning is as close to an act of kindness as this story can afford—and it goes unheeded.
This is the first we see of Westray. The last will be on the cold, wet concrete of a London sidewalk, where an ambulance team will lift his headless and gushing corpse off the ground and place his body in a van, while another member of the team lifts and places his head inside with the body, along with the diabolical coil that separated the two.
“It’s a mechanical device,” the jagged-haired drug dealer Reiner warns his friend the Counselor earlier in the film. “And it has this small electric motor with this rather incredible compound gear that retrieves a steel cable. Battery driven. And the cable is made out of some unholy alloy, almost impossible to cut it. And it’s in a loop. And you come up behind the guy and you drop it over his head and you pull the free end of the cable tight and walk away. No one ever even sees you. And pulling the cable activates the motor and the noose starts to tighten and it continues to tighten until it goes to zero.” It’s a description of the bolito, a ruthlessly efficient weapon in the film’s hallucinatory portraiture of a fatalistically hell-fucked and gore-spattered universe in which all things are ordained not by some uncaring and coldly hateful god, but by our very own actions. Like Westray’s description of the snuff film, Reiner’s careful delineation of the bolito serves simultaneously as warning and punishing evisceration. It is yet another cautioning to the Counselor not to enter this world, and it is also a vivisection of The Counselor itself, of the film’s structure and what it feels like to experience it (“the wire cuts through the carotid arteries and then sprays blood all over the spectators and everybody goes home”).
This is the first we see of Reiner. The last will be on a dirt patch off the side of a road, neither the bullet hole in his thigh nor one in his imploded forehead gushing much blood because his heart is already dead. Nearby children gather to rob his corpse of jewelry, money, and shoes, and he is left valueless next to the burned-out husk of a car that looms against the gray sky like the desiccated fossil of some nameless thing that stalked these plains before the clumsy blights of men and language.
This is the Counselor’s world, and this is the world of The Counselor.
—the past, everything falls into the past; the world that is this moment exists only for this moment, and then it passes into another world, into the past, as unreachable and unchangeable and irrevocable as the future world that is to come, the one that was written in what is now the past.
Or so he muses, the motorcyclist, as his brutal spin around this story tightens toward its center. Its middle.
He stops at a small market, his leathers sweat-stuck to him like second skin, and purchases dog food. A woman in line—kindly, simple—sees his lineless face, all tattooed from scalp to neckline in a symbology alien to the whole of her universe. Cartel ink. Sees the tar-black cold of his eyes, the malignance of his young, rawboned features, and is compelled to define, to quantify, to converse, to understand the silhouette-shaped cavity next to her, and asks if he has a dog.
His response is minutes long and patience-testing, teasing force of fate that he is. Cruel trickster. He spins the circle of a tale around her, laborious and ridiculous at once, detailed with insane arcana. That he has a secret. The perfect diet. You don’t eat food. You eat dog treats instead. These diets you read about these days? He lost twenty-seven pounds in thirty days with this dog food. After a while you crave nothing else. You want to lose weight? This is it. But be careful. Last time he ended up in the hospital. And his voice turns blade-deadly: You got to keep your mind on your business. This is his warning. A caution.
Her confusion total, she hears the story but not the warning. She asks how he ended up in the hospital. Was it a systemic reaction? Questions, the need for definitions, the awkward grasp of language to see the world.
He draws the ring of his anecdote pitilessly taut.
“Oh no, ma’am,” he explains. “It wasn’t anything like that. I was sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.”
He leaves her with the punchline to a joke she could not understand, and a warning she did not heed. The entirety of their interaction a world already spinning abyssward in his rearview.
Back on the bike, speeding forward as the last remnants of daylight die screaming against the sky, like glowing scratch marks on the cosmos before all is drowned in sludge-dark night. He—
As with any soap opera, The Counselor is built atop (and best exemplified by) long, dramatic conversations in which its characters struggle with the limitations of language to quantify the nature of their existence, of love, of sex, of evil (good elicits nary a mention), and—most of all—of cause and effect, of coming to terms with a reality that is constructed wholly by decisions they made in the past, before they even knew the deciding was to be done. The latter is a theme that sinuously weaves throughout McCarthy’s work like a slithering canebreak rattlesnake, rearing back to bare its fangs in No Country for Old Men, but only finally, fatally delivering its venom in the coursing colloquies of The Counselor.
Hear it in the long, oft-criticized conversation between the Counselor and a diamond dealer (Bruno Ganz) selling him a monumentally expensive engagement ring. The dealer painstakingly teaches the Counselor diamond terminology and science, continually pushing against the Counselor’s desire for a perfect diamond, as no such diamond could exist—diamonds are defined by their flaws, and a perfect diamond would be made only of light, without corporeity or valuation. And still the Counselor stupidly seeks perfection, so the dealer offers him “a cautionary diamond”—one that can be used to announce and define the beauty of Laura to all the darkness of the world, even though the dealer also notes the darkness will still claim us all. The Counselor does not hear.
Hear it when Westray defines the word cautionary to the Counselor as “an instrument in which one person stands as surety for another,” presaging the place upon the wheel of fate that Laura will take as surety for the consequence of choices the Counselor has already made, and has not even considered. The Counselor does not hear.
Hear it when a motorcyclist for the cartel stops for a bag of dog food and a woman makes the mistake of attempting to define his world (which is beyond her understanding) with her own world (which is already slipping into the past). Hear it when his act of storytelling ridicule serves as a structural model for each and every scene of this film. The woman does not hear.
Hear it when a tragically hilarious Reiner recalls to the Counselor the night that Malkina made him watch as she fucked the windshield of Reiner’s sun-yellow Ferrari, smearily orgasming against cold glass in an act of wanton carnality so beyond the reach of human understanding that the drug dealer can sense only the faintest outlines of monstrosity within her. He feels an annihilative shape taking form around Malkina, but to what purpose he cannot say; he feels compelled to warn the Counselor of it anyway—neither man realizing she is planning to murder the cartel motorcyclist in order to steal $20 million worth of cartel drugs, an act that will ignite the cataclysmic chain of events set into place by the Counselor’s decision to invest in the deal in the first place. Because the Counselor does not hear.
Hear it when Laura is kidnapped by the cartel for purposes so repugnantly vile as to defy the possibilities of language itself. Hear it in the banalities of words and meanings when the Counselor begs for a meeting with the cartel bosses to save Laura, is told by a cartel connection to be careful not to put people he cares about “in the center of things,” and stops amid the nightmare of it all to linguistically correct this cartel man with “in the middle.” The Counselor listens but does not hear.
Hear it when the Counselor finally earns a telephone audience with cartel boss Jefe (Rubén Blades), who in a hypnotically long scene (that serves both both counterweight to the jeweler’s conversation and as the finest sequence in the film) uses the tragic poetry of the Spanish symbolist Antonio Machado to explain the coruscating philosophy at the heart of the film, and indeed, McCarthy’s entire body of work: “The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There’s only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago.” He closes by noting “You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist.” The Counselor never hears.
Hear it when the bolito structure of The Counselor tightens to its final zero: the perfect circle of a DVD, with “HOLA!” scrawled monstrously on its surface, is delivered to the Counselor after Jefe makes clear that Laura has passed into a world unreachable, and perhaps in his ragged screams the Counselor finally remembers Westray’s elucidation about the nature of snuff filmmaking, and finally hears the warning that was given.
Hear it in how the Counselor goes forever unnamed, unquantified. The film is his journey to reckon with himself and his choices. We cannot truly know him until this story is over, and once it is over then his name no longer matters. It existed in another world that is now gone. There is only the here and now, and what Malkina calls “the slaughter to come,” which, based on our own decisions, is likely “beyond our imagining.”
But it was not beyond the imaginings of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy, who in The Counselor crafted a staggering nightmare of cause and effect, of truth and consequences, of language and meanings, of the world to come and the world that is lost. It uses our definitions of the noir thriller against us, only to snare around our necks something far more merciless, bleak, and true: there will be blood—yours, theirs, mine, ours. We are beyond advising. The Counselor understands that the inherent comedy of such lies in the inarguable fact that the only souls who could change that bitter reality—the only souls who could save us—are our past selves, and they are long dead, ghosts of worlds that no longer exist. The Counselor also understands the tragedy inherent in that comedy: that soon the entire world, the one where you live, where you are reading these very words, is dying fast and ugly in this very moment, a once-infinite bolito circle dwindling to zero.
And it’s taking you with it.
—guns the engine past far past 200 mph, numbers past mere mileage into numbers that can only serve as times of day, until he is speeding beyond time itself now as well, beyond time and this very world, as all begins to spin over and over and over and over, the whole world rolling like the inside of a wheel, and in that moment he smiles as it all becomes so briefly clear that his head has been separated from his body and is pirouetting high into the air, that the road he was on has been sabotaged and latticed with the same kind of unholy wire used to make the bolitos he’s only heard of but never seen, he watches in the last synapse spasms of brain death as his motorcycle comets across asphalt, all sparks and metal, as his body snaps and breaks against stubborn earth, and yes, he smiles—he can appreciate the joke that a force of fate such as himself, a man whose existence and lack thereof will chain-react a level of cartel hell to come that is beyond the understanding of those who will be consumed by it, that even he is not outside the reach of the bolito’s unforgiving wire, and as his head careens back to the ground, his vision darkens, an ever-dwindling dot of onrushing world, a world that is slipping into a darkness beyond language itself.
The circle closes. 
Travis Woods lives and writes in Los Angeles. As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
Illustration: Olivier Courbet.
