In the Flesh: The Counselor (Extended Edition)

“Grief transcends value,” says the nameless Jefe (Rubén Blades) of the drug cartel pursuing the titular Counselor (Michael Fassbender). “A man would trade whole nations for one more hour with his beloved, but he can get nothing for his grief, because grief is worthless.” The discursive, philosophical conversation between the drug lord and the lawyer is characteristic of McCarthy’s screenwriting. It’s The Counselor’s greatest strength, this commitment to literary language, with the straightforward deal gone wrong crime plot serving largely as an excuse to put great actors in rooms together and watch them chew on McCarthy’s prose. There are some slip-ups, to be sure. Cameron Diaz’s work as the soapily evil and opportunistic Malkina mostly works, especially in the staggering car-fucking scene and in her tete-a-tete with Laura (Penelope Cruz), but there are just some things she can’t get across with her broad and nonspecific diction. “By the time the axe is at the door, I’ll already be gone,” just doesn’t sound right coming from Cameron Diaz, you know?

The script’s silences are just as meticulously tailored as its verbal exchanges. An extended sequence in which a team of junkyard workers quickly clean and repair a tanker truck laden with cocaine after its involvement in a gunfight is a particularly spellbinding example of McCarthy’s attention to detail, as well as Scott’s knack for shooting complex labor. While he leans a little heavy on the then-ubiquitous yellow filter, he’s otherwise at his most patient and studious when it comes to both lighting and composition. The slow, methodical progress of the scene in which a hired gun (Sam Spruell) strings a high-tension wire across a remote back road and then waits for hours for his motorcyclist target to behead himself on it is a masterclass in pacing. The physical ratcheting of the wire, the subtle changes in the gangster’s body language as time passes, it serves to create a sense of suspended tension, a feeling of ethereal but imminent violence even the beheading itself doesn’t so much alleviate as heighten.

After Jefe describes the life and suffering of the poet Antonio Machado to the doomed Counselor in an effort to make him understand his situation, the Counselor, heartbroken, responds simply, “I’m not a poet.” He has no mechanism by which to make sense of his loss, no language with which to render it intelligible to himself, or to the world around him. And when art does materialize around his experience, Jefe is proven right. There is no way out. There is no world in which the Counselor escapes his death, or manages to trade himself in time for Laura. All that’s left is understanding, a bottomless drop into the abyss. Like Laura’s headless corpse, dumped unceremoniously into a landfill, he has become an icon of suffering, incandescent with terrible meaning and utterly powerless. His choices mean nothing. He is not an active agent in his own story. It’s a devastating flourish, bleak and harsh and beautiful.