The derided movie Ridley Scott will defend to the death: “I was so beaten up for that”
Ridley Scott is one of the most respected directors of his generation. Even if he doesn’t command the respect or award nominations of a Martin Scorsese or a Francis Ford Coppola, his filmography speaks for itself. His breakout hit, Alien, changed the face of science fiction forever and set a template for a female action protagonist that few films have lived up to in the decades since. He’s blended big-budget commercial movies with low-budget passion projects and disparate genres over the years, leading to a diverse body of work.
Scott’s output is relentless, which is probably partly to blame for the occasional duds in his filmography. There are the ones that could be considered underappreciated masterpieces, like Alien: Covenant and The Last Duel, and the ones that might have had some good ideas behind them that just didn’t manage to make it to the big screen in one piece due to the scale of the operation. Kingdom of Heaven and Napoleon come to mind in this category.
Then, there’s The Counselor, an aberration so glaring that Scott could credibly claim to have had nothing to do with it and left audiences to draw their own conclusions. Released in 2013 and written by bestselling author Cormac McCarthy, the film features an A-list cast that was so degraded by the script that it almost feels like a secret hit job.
Michael Fassbender plays the titular counsellor, a lawyer who decides to do business with a shadowy nightclub owner, played by Javier Bardem and his middleman, played by Brad Pitt. Penélope Cruz plays the counsellor’s fiancée, while Cameron Diaz steals the movie out from under everyone else as Bardem’s psychopathic girlfriend.
The film is full of incomprehensible dialogue, such as “the truth has no temperature” and “The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass.” Then, there’s that infamous scene where Diaz has sex with a car. There is so much philosophy and moralism going on that it’s hard to hold onto the plot. Ultimately, it received polarised reviews, with some critics hailing it as ingenious and others condemning it as a self-important trainwreck.
Scott remains a stubborn defender of the film. Always a fighter when it comes to critics, he claimed in an interview with Variety in 2017 that the film is one of his best.
“I love The Counselor,” he insisted, “And I was so beaten up for that. It’s one of my favourites. People complained it was nihilistic — of course it is! But nihilism’s OK. So was Apocalypse Now, so was The Godfather, for God’s sake.”
Of all the things he might have said, “for God’s sake” is pretty mild. As someone who frequently tells critics to go fuck themselves, it’s practically the verbal equivalent of a kiss on the forehead. Whether The Counselor emerges as an underappreciated classic remains to be seen, but given how it takes a maximalist approach to acting, dialogue, and cheetahs, it’s bound to at least become a cult classic at some point.
