There's something about Malkina

The Counselor 2013 U.S. (117 minutes) directed by Ridley Scott; written by Cormac McCarthy; cinematography by Dariusz Wolski; editing by Pietro Scalia; music by Daniel Pemberton; dedicated to Tony Scott.

Is there a tougher job than being a protagonist in a Cormac McCarthy story?

The Counselor is an incredibly watchable film that is just as incredibly difficult to watch. It’s a taut, tough gut-wrencher by a writer known for taut, tough gut-wrenchers, set in the dry wastes of the United States’ southern border with Mexico.

McCarthy’s first produced original screenplay is a neo-film noir about a lawyer with large ideas of living larger. The lawyer’s greed inserts him into a relentless sequence of events for which his ambition and success in the straight world have ill prepared him.

The movie has been criticized for being more literary than filmic, and there is lots of talk and many moving parts. McCarthy fans probably will love it. Five big stars, some well-cut cameos, and Ridley Scott’s directorial pizzazz make it a fittingly lavish B film.  

There is also over-the-top sex and violence, though less by documentation than appeal to a viewer’s imagination. A head is shaken from a motorcycle helmet at night after a high-speed beheading. A decomposing body turns up in a 55-gallon steel drum, a ‘joke’ sent from one drug lord to another. And an ‘automatic garrote’ mentioned in act one turns up in act three.

As for the sex, there are two vaginal dialogues—a couple engaged in cunnilingus, mostly hidden by white sheets, and a former exotic dancer who in her own words ‘fucks’ her boyfriend’s Ferrari by rubbing her bikini-waxed sex on the windshield before his stunned eyes. He later compares what only he saw to the mouth of a ‘catfish’ against aquarium glass—‘too gynecological to be sexy,’ he assures his interlocutor.

MP will do no more than set the table.

Michael Fassbender as the Counselor in Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013).

The Counselor of the title, the James Bond-dashing Michael Fassbender, is a criminal defense attorney in a solo practice in El Paso, Texas. We never learn his name, we never see his office; his work involves travel, and he does not discuss his work with his girlfriend Laura (Penélope Cruz), also a well-to-do working professional.

Apart from establishing the Counselor’s idea about the high life, a trip he takes to ‘Dateline: Amsterdam’ seems to be a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. The sole purpose of this trip is the purchase of a diamond not quite the size of the Ritz with which to propose to Laura. Austrian star Bruno Ganz does a nice cameo as the Dutch diamond dealer.        

One of the Counselor’s clients is Reiner (Javier Bardem), a charming and amusing night club operator who owns a pair of cheetahs, and also a septic tank business. Starched and spit-shined Anglo law enforcement want as little as possible to do with sweaty, greasy Mexicans driving beat-up honey-dippers. This makes the latter an ideal conveyance for industrial quantities of Columbian cocaine. 

Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and pet cheetah in The Counselor (2013) 

Reiner consumes conspicuously; he shares his exotic tastes with his girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz), a sleek, tawny feline cipher with showy, expensive clothes and jewelry and a spray of cheetah spots tattooed across her back. He tells the Counselor that he has no idea what she knows about his business—‘probably everything,’ he admits.

Reiner tells the Counselor that Malkina was an exotic dancer. Malkina tells Laura that she is from Barbados, and that both her parents were thrown into the ocean from a helicopter when she was three years old. We later find out that Malkina has a long-term professional relationship with a private banker in London.

Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz with cheetah spots in The Counselor (2013)

In fact, no one really knows the least thing about Malkina. She gives indications of being a psychopath along the lines of clinical descriptions in Hervey Cleckley’s classic The Mask of Sanity: a calculating, dispassionate seductress as though joyously devoid of empathy, who engages in off-putting, outrageous behavior, particularly sexual (e.g., the ‘catfish’).

The Counselor and Reiner are preparing to open a new night club as partners. The question at outset is whether the Counselor will put up money as a partner in a one-time Colombia-to-Chicago cocaine shipment via Reiner’s septic tank business: 625 kilos of cocaine worth $20 million.

The return on his investment would be excessively beyond what straight money would bring. It’s the border; people do this all the time, the Counselor reasons. It’s what made Reiner and others rich. He’ll be able to put his share down on the night club and get his girl the big rock.  

Reiner and Westray (Brad Pitt), another underground contact in the deal, each caution the Counselor of the dire risks this enterprise entails. As a canny and experienced criminal defense lawyer who thinks he’s hip to the street and on top of his game, the Counselor figures himself equal to the challenge.

Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender in The Counselor (2013).

Aye, there’s the rub. There’s more at stake here than fudging legal ethics and breaking the law. When certain people start telling you how smart you are, chances are they think they’ve got your number and they’re working on your wallet and watch.

The part the Counselor does not get until it is too late is that this business world operates by its own customs, rules, and logic. It has to. The stakes are high because the ‘cartels’ are at war. Things that happen in this world have specific meanings. There are no coincidences. And when things go wrong—as they do here—draconian consequences have to be automatic, swift and sure. It’s just business, made intensely personal.

Once the Counselor ‘crossed the border’ from his life that was, his career and lovely wife, ‘life is not going to take you back,’ an anonymous ‘jefe’ (Reubén Blades) tells him.

‘There’s no choosing, there’s only accepting,’ the jefe says. ‘The choosing was done a long time ago.’