Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) A lawyer finds himself in over his head when he gets involved in drug trafficking.
About: Okay, so here’s the deal. Famed author Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country For Old Men) sold his first spec script last year, The Counselor. The movie quickly mobilized with Ridley Scott directing, Michael Fassbender playing the lead, and lots of other stars playing the supporting parts (Javier Barden, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz). Now I didn’t know this, but apparently Cormac McCarthy is a huge movie buff and wrote a bunch of screenplays before this (you wouldn’t know it by looking at the script, which is a cross between a treatment, a play, and notes scrawled on a napkin). He needed a break from writing novels so I guess he banged this out in a few weeks. You can actually read more about McCarthy’s exploits into screenwriting in this Wall Street Journal article (where Scriptshadow is mentioned – yeah!). Anyway, the film debuted this weekend to a disappointing 8 million bucks. Critics didn’t like it either (it’s currently at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes). Let’s see if we can figure out what went wrong!
Writer: Cormac McCarthy
Details: movie was 117 minutes. Script is 115 pages.
Cormac McCarthy has been hit with the same criticism over and over again this weekend regarding his film, The Counselor: Nobody knows what the hell is going on in the movie. That is definitely an issue that needed to be solved at the script stage. However, Ridley Scott and Fox weren’t about to tell a Pulitzer-prize winner how to write. So when he turned in his script, they were pretty much shooting what was on the page.
And that’s too bad, cause even though this script is such a mess, it could’ve been fixed with some guidance and some development. I mean, people ask why projects get stuck in development so long. It’s because when they don’t, they end up like this. A script that has some good ideas in it, but which is anything but a finished product. I mean I can tell you one thing RIGHT NOW that would’ve made this script infinitely better. Something that most amateur screenwriters (which McCarthy definitely is) don’t know. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first, let’s deal with the “plot.”
So we got this guy, The Counselor. I guess that makes him a lawyer of some sort. The Counselor is really good friends with a dude with wild hair named Reiner. Reiner hangs out with a vamped up Cameron Diaz (Malkina), whose favorite past time is watching her cheetahs hunt down rabbits in an open field. It’s unclear where all of these characters live. It’s either in Mexico or in a U.S. state close to Mexico.
Anyway, the Counselor has a really long unclear conversation with Reiner about something he’s going to do. It’s not clear what that is, nor is it clear if it’s supposed to be unclear what that is. But the Counselor seems nervous about it. The Counselor zips around the city after this chat, ending up at a diamond place. Okay, maybe that hush-hush conversation was about the diamond trade? Maybe the Counselor is trying to steal diamonds?
No! He’s actually getting a diamond ring to propose to his girlfriend. Yay! The Counselor continues to jet around the city, eventually meeting up with Brad Pitt, who warns him away from this terrible thing he’s planning to do (even though we still don’t know what that is). He then visits a mother in jail who wants the Counselor to free her son, who’s in jail on a motorcycle speeding ticket. (?????)
After a few more talks with Reiner, we watch some dude on a motorcycle get decapitated via a metal wire on a highway. Ah-ha! I remember Mother Jail Chick talking about her son the motorcycler so I’m assuming this is the same guy. The man who decapitates Motorcycle Dude then takes something that was inside his helmet. But what!? (no really, what? can’t anything be clear here??)
Brad Pitt then calls The Counselor and says, “Dude. Baaaaad news. We’re all fucked!” Now up until this point, Brad Pitt was presented as a friendly mentor who had no connection to whatever The Counselor was doing. So I don’t know why he’s, all of a sudden, in trouble. But it’s enough to freak The Counselor out, who runs over to Reiner’s place and says, “Yo, we’re screwed!” Except we’re still not sure what’s going on or why anyone’s screwed.
Oh wait! The people who decapitated Motorcycle Dude are going to get a truck. I need to make some assumptions here because this movie is so vague about what’s going on, I really have no other choice. It APPEARS to me that the Counselor has gone in on a huge drug deal. It just so happened that the Motorcycle Dude he released for Mother Jail Chick was some sort of courier for the bad guys who dealt these drugs. When that Courier was killed, he had a message on him for where the drugs were (the truck!). This allowed this third party to steal the truck (and hence the drugs).
Of course, since The Counselor is responsible for releasing the motorcycle guy in the first place, the Mexican drug cartel who made a deal with The Counselor believes he’s orchestrating some sly double-cross move where he kills Motorcycle Dude and takes the drugs himself. For that reason, they order a hit on him, which is why he, Reiner and Brad Pitt have to scatter. That, my friends, is the best I can do on the plot for The Counselor.
Okay, so how bad is this script? Pretty bad. It certainly does feel like it was written in three weeks. Nothing is really connected. Everything feels thrown together. This is not something McCarthy put very much effort into – and it shows. It reads like a what’s what on amateur screenwriting mistakes. Let’s look at some of these mistakes, shall we?
MISTAKE 1 – Establish your main character.
McCarthy never showed us the Counselor in his natural habitat. Therefore we never really knew what he was or what he did. Sure, he’s called “the Counselor,” but in movies we need to SEE things in action for them to really stick. We needed to SEE this guy in court. This contributed to a good deal of the confusion in the film. Since we never knew what he did, we never knew what he was doing. I couldn’t tell if he was visiting all these people for his job (whatever that was) or for something else entirely.
MISTAKE 2 – Your main character should not be the least important character in the script.
Ouch, you learn this in Screenwriting 101. Don’t make your main character uninteresting. And now that I think about it, this is a classic novelist mistake. See in novels, you get to tell us what the main character is thinking. You don’t get to do that in screenwriting. The only way for us to know what a character is thinking is if he says it or he does it. And novelists will wrongly assume that because THEY know all these deep thoughts going on inside their main character’s head, that it’ll somehow ooze out as they speak or act. WRONG. You need to give us some quirks, some problems, some personality – anything to BRING THIS CHARACTER TO LIFE. It was painful watching Fassbender after awhile because his character was sooooo boring. And audiences don’t care about boring people. They want their main characters to be interesting!
MISTAKE 3 – Keep the philosophizing to a none-imum.
Granted Cormac McCarthy’s monologuing philosophizing characters who drone on about women, the world, death, grief, and happiness are going to be a little more interesting than Screenwriting John’s, who just wrote his first screenplay last night. But that doesn’t matter. It’s never about how interesting or uninteresting a philosophy-based monologue is. It’s the fact that when characters start philosophizing, IT STOPS YOUR STORY COLD. Everything is put on hold so we can hear some random Mexican bartender explain that grief is a bad thing. Okay, WHO THE F*CK CARES? We don’t care. We just want to see a good story. And because your character can’t shut up, we’re not able to do that. There were something like a dozen philosophy-laden monologues in this script. I would advise never going above zero.
MISTAKE 4 – Don’t include unneeded characters.
Can someone tell me what the HELL Brad Pitt was doing in this movie???? He seemed to be a sort of mentor? A friend who gave our main character advice? Um, okay, here’s some screenwriting advice. If you can take a character out of your screenplay, and nothing about the story changes, you don’t need that character. I call these “Island Characters.” Because they’re off on their own islands and have nothing to do with the story at hand. This character was pointless and should’ve been removed.
MISTAKE 5 – If you’re going to set something up, pay if off.
Okay, you’ve got TWO CHEETAHS featured prominently throughout the film. Two dangerous wild animals who get a TON of screen time. If you’re like me, you can’t wait until later when these giant cats are let loose in some uncontrolled environment and they begin wreaking havoc on some poor helpless character. Nope. These cheetahs were just… window dressing I guess. They do get away under uncontrolled circumstances later in the film. But they simply walk off. That’s it. That’s their big finale. If you’re going to set something up, PAY IT OFF!
But see, all of these mistakes paled in comparison to the one big one – the one that may have actually saved this film. It was one of these simple problems that every veteran screenwriter knows but writers who HAVEN’T BEEN AROUND THE SCREENWRITING BLOCK yet don’t. The big problem with The Counselor was that nobody knew what was going on. And the REASON nobody knew what was going on was because the writer never TOLD US what was going on.
When it comes to plot points and motivations THE WRITER MUST BE CLEAR. You can’t dick around with that stuff. Writers think they’re catering to the smarter upscale viewer when they keep their plot points subtle. But the reality is, the audience (even the smart ones) need that moment where a character says, “I’m doing THIS so I can have THIS.” That’s all we needed here! A scene where The Counselor told us THAT HE WAS GOING IN ON A HUGE DRUG DEAL. But we never got it. For some reason that was just assumed. Which meant for the first 70 minutes of the movie, we had no idea what was going on.
This practice continued throughout the script where too many plot points were glazed over. We needed characters who clarified who the motorcycle guy was and who told us what the truck was about. Because we were never told, we were left out in the cold, and if you do that one too many times in a script, we check out. I mean it seems like the most obvious advice in the world and yet I still see writers make this mistake all the time: BE CLEAR! That’s all. Just BE CLEAR with what’s going on. We don’t know what’s happening UNLESS YOU TELL US.
Now there were a few good things here. I liked Cameron Diaz’s character. She was fun. (spoiler) Brad Pitt’s death scene was cool. And I just like Ridley Scott as a director. But man, he was given a really bad script here. The writing was on the wall before this was shot.
Script rating:
[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Movie rating:
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Scripts written quickly always FEEL like they were written quickly. So don’t think you’re fooling anyone. Scenes go on for too long. Characters talk too much. Everything feels loose and unfocused, leading to a lot of confusion. There’s a clear lack of setups and payoffs. Not surprisingly, all of those problems were on display here. Coincidence?
