It is not "No Country For Old Men" but I still think it's a damn good movie (even though it left me with questions that I cannot answer). I got together, for a baseball game, with friend of mine I used to work with 16 years ago & who was someone I always used to talk movies with & he asked me if I had any picks since the last time we talked movies. One of the ones I gave him was The Counselor. He emailed me a couple of weeks ago & said, "it was awesome. Thanks."
Yeah, I had some real problems with stuff I couldn't figure out, & if you have them figured out, feel free to clue me:
1) Fasbender was a middle man, simply a source of money for finance of the operation, but why did these cartel guys even need that? It seems as if they had abundant resources for smuggling coke without him.
2) So the Green Hornet got killed & the wire man (who was working for or with Malkina) got the chip or whatever it was that was needed to steal the sewage truck with the coke, but how & why did that implicate Fasbender? Wouldn't he have just been stealing from himself?
3) & why did Rosie Peres (AND the cartel) blame Fasbender just because he bailed her kid out?
Those questions (& there are others) bothered me so much that I bought two different copies of the screenplay (they turned out only to have different covers) & watched the movie several times, & loved it each time, but still I couldn't answer those questions for myself.
If you can answer those, I won't be bitter, I'll just accept that I am dense with that kind of stuff & you are just more on a cerebral plane with McCarthy than I am.
As it is, I just gave up trying to figure out those nagging questions & learned to accept that it was either just out of my black & white reach or that McCarthy enjoyed leaving puzzles.
As with "No Country . . ." I thought the dialogue was superb.
I am not a big Brad Pitt fan, but I thought that in this one, he was spectacular.
But you know what they say about opinions.
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Drooch (5333)
3 years ago
1) I saw it as Fassbender investing in an enterprise, much like how he invested in Reiner’s club. Presumably, whatever the deal was the people conducting the operation stand to earn bigger bucks by having outside investors onboard. Perhaps they take a slice of the profits, and the more drugs they smuggle/sell, the more they make.
I suspect there are more details to be gleaned from Counselor’s initial chat with Pitt (which might be longer in the extended cut - the only version I’ve seen) that whole conversation takes a couple views to digest all the details. Watch the extended cut if you haven’t already, and revisit that scene.
2) We learn from Pitt’s second chat with Counselor by the hotel pool that once the drugs were stolen the cartel immediately suspects foul play by anyone else involved in the deal, they’re paranoid about people screwing them over, and immediately set about punishing them. Perhaps they suspected Counselor of stealing the drugs so he can sell them ‘on his own’ and not have to share with his partners.
I don’t know if this is how things work in the real world, but in McCarthy’s world the moment you climb in bed with the cartel your days are numbered. Hell, even the harmless guy in a jeep who merely witnessed the cartel guys in a gunfight was immediately machine gunned to death.
3) Ruth (Peres) might have been cartel connected. Her son was a well known criminal, and she seemed extremely cynical and world-weary. If the cartel suspects Counselor of foul play, perhaps she does too.
The film certainly doesn’t hold the viewers’ hand (which I respect) and drops a lot of details into its many dialogue scenes which can be hard to follow 100% but those are my best guesses.
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