Film Carew: The Counselor, Fruitvale Station

THE COUNSELOR

In an essay accompanying the release of Damien Jurado's latest LP, Brothers And Sisters Of The Eternal Sun, Fleet Foxes drummer turned rock-evangelist Father John Misty mocked the rote critical reading of Jurado's work as an “excavation of the American landscape and the rural psyche,” instead pointing out that the romanticised America of “abandoned motels [and] barren highways” had no bearing on the “air-conditioned nightmare” of actual contemporary life in the USA. Cormac McCarthy's novels - books like All The Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men - have long provided fodder for those tending to the mythology of mythical America; but, The Counselor, his first-ever straight-up screenplay, feels like an attempt to portray that air-conditioned nightmare. It's set on the Tex-Mex border between upwardly-mobile El Paso and murderous Juarez, but its parade of lavish desert-mansions and coke-money nightclubs has the wealth-porn quality of an '80s action-movie. The film itself feels like an '80s action-movie, too, because the always-questionable Ridley Scott is behind the lens; shooting everything with a glossy veneer that only heightens how repellent the characters are.

This may be the point: McCarthy giving us a parade of the abhorrently wealthy and grotesquely greedy, committing lawless acts so as to maintain their lavish lifestyles; the tenuous lives of those upon high - and their inevitable topple from the perch - working as a parable for life in housing-bubble America. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that this isn't some righteous tale of a guy-who's-a-dick-but-is-in-love-with-a-good-woman (Michael Fassbender, smirkin') getting in over his head then clawing his way out of it, but something less-audience-friendly, more deeply unsatisfying and dark. During its final reel, the wordy monologues get more detached and existential; when Cameron Diaz says “the slaughter to come is beyond our imagining” in The Counselor's final scene, she's not talking some cartel-war in Mexico, but the future of all humanity on an overpopulated planet.

The big problem, of course, is that Cameron Diaz is delivering this speech. Trussed up like a human cheetah (for real), Diaz is the worst offender in a celebrity cast playing a lazy game of dress-ups; from Brad Pitt's ivory cowboy (whose hard-man advice feels like a fourth-rate take on things he said in the infinitely-superior Killing Them Softly) to Javier Bardem's shrine to nouveau-riche bad taste. Scott's assembled an impressive cast, but it's not that impressive when Penélope Cruz is made Penelope-in-peril, or Edgar Ramírez has a single scene as a priest that doesn't like Diaz talkin' sexy in confessional, or Bruno Ganz only delivers diamond-appraisal talk that doubles as dopey metaphor. And let us not forget Toby Kebbell, who shows up for a solitary scene seemingly to deliver one of the all-time worst 'Southern' (I guess) accents ever caught on celluloid. Diaz, Bardem, and Fassbender are all variations of awful; and, with the words wobbling unconvincingly out of their mouths, McCarthy's writing seems overwritten and overwrought. The existential speeches near close are one thing (especially when they're coming from Rubén Blades, who does more for this film in one scene than anyone else in the cast), but when Bardem and Fassbender talk the difference between men and women, it's like being stuck listening to a laughless routine from a stand-up comedian.

Which is to say nothing of the awful Daniel Pemberton score, the way jaunty Mexican music is piped in whenever a sewage truck filled with drugs comes into frame, Scott's insistence on staging conversations as if they're chase scenes, the constant tenor of tedious machismo, some cold-fish flirting between Diaz and Cruz, or its already-infamous scene in which Diaz 'fucks' the windshield of some rich-jerk convertible. If this is McCarthy authoring a lurid parody on the grotesquery of All-American greed, then The Counselor's entire mise-en-scène is misjudged. But, maybe, all this manifest shittiness flows out from the screenplay that birthed it; and having Diaz say things like “I think that falls under the category of 'tough shit'” whilst stroking a cheetah is what McCarthy really wants to say in a film set against a city in which 4000 women have been 'disappeared' in the past 20 years. McCarthy's literary credentials won't be too tarnished by this cinematic folly, but The Counselor sure calls them into question; showing, at the very least, that he ain't no Bolaño.

FRUITVALE STATION

Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station was made long before the Trayvon Martin verdict was handed down, but its spectre persists throughout the film; a portrait of life in a country in which a black man is so innately threatening that shooting him is legally defensible. Coogler's debut has its own real-life death at core: a 2009 police-shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland. Coogler's loaded film is, effectively, a series of minor reversals on audience's expectations. Some will see it as a virtuous challenge to racism, but, really, the stereotypes being refuted aren't cultural so much as pop-cultural, entrenched from a thousand movies before it. Coogler does so, largely, with a single device: text messages shown superimposed. When Michael B. Jordan, as Grant, is texting someone named 'Mom', it's really his mom. When you think he's trying to talk his mistress into a lunch-hour quickie, it's really his girlfriend. When it seems like he's gonna ask for the number of a girl he's chatting up, he's instead calling Grandma for fish-frying advice. Grant is hardly made a saint - he's done time, sold drugs, slept around - but Coogler works to subvert every thug cliché. When Jordan scopes out a suit-wearing white man's jewellery, he's really just looking at his wedding ring, seeking advice about proposing to his girlfriend; the aboutface made complete when the guy admits he stole the first engagement ring he gave his wife, thereby transferring the role of thief.

It's a film that's about the presumptive guilt of being a black male, and Coogler reminds you of it constantly. But the reason these little turns work isn't just because of audience prejudice or long-running stereotype, but because of what Fruitvale Station is. This is a film in which shit will go wrong, in which a man will be shot; every happy moment soon to be lost to imminent tragedy. Coogler creates a sense of unexpected unease, directorially, by holding on shots of BART-station platforms after trains have departed; the eerie silence left in their wake serving as ill-omen. There's other moments of foreshadowing that aren't as elegant, but this isn't a film interested in implication; in subtleties or moral greys. Instead, it's a protest movie, a defiant polemic that seeks to humanise - and, perhaps, romanticise - a human who was turned into a casualty of police oppression. Its final stretches make this overt, and forcefully so; the real-life footage of Grant's real-life daughter a crowning moment of dramatic heavy-handedness. But whilst this limits its cinematic power, it amplifies its political might; Fruitvale Station a work of social justice that can be forgiven its virtuousness.