This weekend I visited an old friend, a film junkie like me who is always eager to share his stack of restaurant gift cards and free passes to the movies. Without planning it, we ended up at the theatre twice in two days, which is highly unusual, as I only go out to see films a few times a year anymore. Two other friends had insisted that Gravity must be seen on the big screen, and of course I wanted to see Cormac McCarthy's first screenplay, The Counselor, brought to life by Ridley Scott and his talented cast (spoilers ahead).
The Counselor was a mixed bag. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. I loved Cormack McCarthy's books No Country For Old Men and The Road and thought both movies were also great. His Blood Meridian is a brutal, relentless masterpiece that will indeed be difficult to adapt, if and when it ever happens. The chase scene culminating in a home-made batch of gunpowder remains indelibly burned into my brain, but Blood Meridian has the same problem that McCarthy's first story written directly for the screen, The Counselor, has.
There is no central character to become attached to, to empathize with, to endure alongside and suffer through with because he or she is a protagonist who is not simply all good or all bad or even finely nuanced necessarily but absolutely human and simply well-rendered, with heart enough to be worthy of a reader or viewer's emotional investment. What makes this person tick is not spelled out in excessive detail and yet this protagonist—Llewelyn in No Country, the nameless man in The Road--is drawn with flourishes of humanity such that one cannot help but cheer him along and identify with his struggle. If there’s a McCarthy novel with a female protagonist, I haven’t read it yet.
The Counselor, boasting a bevy of swaggering A-listers at the top of their games, just never connects. It's all procedural, and Ridley Scott deserves plenty of credit for plowing artfully through all those requisite, well-tread procedures that Soderbergh covered thoroughly in Traffic—the drug selling, drug buying, drug shipping, drug dealing, drug warring, drug-mess-cleaning and all the inevitable drug fallout. The movie looks as great as everyone in it, but the procedure train never lingers long enough to get attached to any of the players or to truly care much about their inevitable implosions.
There are some great lines of McCarthy dialog, delivered mostly by stellar character actors in supporting roles—the diamond expert, the cartel lawyer, the chop-shop foreman, etc.—Rosie Perez, Bruno Ganz, Fernando Cayo and John Leguizamo steal brief scenes from the big stars. Some of The Counselor's weakest lines, like "You don't know someone until you know what they want" or "The truth has no temperature" are reserved for its biggest stars. Michael Fassbender's performance, as usual, was admirable and intense, but everyone else seems like a gossamer caricature, strutting lithely through scenes as though they’re as many costume fittings. Everyone looks great and sounds great but says little and means less.
Despite her comedic talents, I did not buy Carmen Diaz as a humorless, comically overdrawn femme-fatale. Though the reliably excellent Javier Bardem has a couple of interesting moments, he is given precious little more to do than is his lovely wife, Penelope Cruz, who barely flirts with the movie from the periphery. Brad Pitt's advice-dispensing Westray, after being presented as a tempered, wizened, wary old veteran of the game makes such an obvious, catastrophic mistake while on the run for his life that I was left wondering if someone else had taken over for McCarthy and written the end of the movie for him.
Though Mr. Pitt survived the zombie hordes in WWZ, his slick cowboy was no match whatsoever for Carmen Diaz's evil cheetah lady. I avoid the torture-porn genre, but Pitt's death is one of the most horrific and shocking shufflings off of the mortal coil catalogued within my cinematic memory, and The Counselor is one of its most crushing downers, too, even if you don't care much about the characters.
Though we found ourselves firmly on the same page with The Counselor, my learned movie-addict friend and I disagreed almost completely over Gravity. We often gripe about the excessive use of computer graphic (CG) imagery in film, but perhaps my tolerance exceeds his. Of course, just about everything in Gravity other than Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and Ed Harris' disembodied voice is comprised of CG, so I might have expected my old friend to be upset. However, I suspect that our differing reactions came down to our ability to suspend our disbelief.
Maybe all the physics don't add up. Maybe there were too many battles with space junk. Maybe the Russians would've been kind enough to ask if we had any astronauts in orbit before launching a fucking missile to destroy a satellite and thus creating an orbital storm of space shrapnel, but none of that really mattered when I was watching the movie.
I found Bullock so compelling and the simulated weightlessness that Mr. Cuaron had ingeniously created so thoroughly convincing that I was right there with Dr. Ryan from the beginning. Holding my breath with her, holding out hope, voting for optimism and for life and all the precious things in it that we all hold so dear. Wait a second. I'm not eating cheeseballs, I swear. And I'm only on my first Yazoo 10th Anniversary White IPA of the evening.
Maybe I have made a change in the last several years. I have moved a little bit toward optimism and a little bit away from pessimism. It's not a seismic paradigm shift; I'm still the same old realist. I just watch a little less of the heaviest drama and let a little more humor in. I'm still drawn to the dark, but I make more of an effort to watch comedy and probably see fewer documentaries. Laughter is good medicine, but so is optimism. As negative as I can get, life is better with a regular dose of both. I love exploration in the face of extreme danger, true-life adventures and survival stories, and with Gravity, I had no problem suspending my disbelief.
Maybe there were too many CG-thingies floating about in the space-station cabins, as my friend pointed out, and maybe survival was improbable and unrealistic, but I cared about Dr. Ryan and wanted her to live. I admired the simplicity of the story, something akin to man versus nature (a favorite literary trope of mine) only this time it was woman versus the unforgiving vacuum of outer space, and there was no filler, just a difficult mission, a severe environment and an epic, personal challenge for a someone that seemed real and worthy of my emotional investment.