If you were to make a list of the top 5 Ridley Scott films, it’s unlikely that the 2013 movie “The Counselor” would make the cut. The film, which stars Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt, isn’t the most well-regarded project in the filmography of the man who gave cinephiles “Alien” and “Blade Runner.” But whereas those films tend to have legions of fans, “The Counselor” might not have the same number of supporters, but it does include Guillermo del Toro among its fanclub members.
Speaking to Variety about “underappreciated” films, del Toro brings up the crime thriller “The Counselor” as an example of a film that hits him so hard due to his personal connection with the story and the way Scott portrays the violence and brutality of the drug business.
The filmmaker starts his defense of the “underappreciated” film by saying that he acknowledges that Hollywood is a business, but we can’t lose track of the art inherent in filmmaking. The fact that people can love a film on a “molecular level” is something that del Toro thinks is truly special.
“But ‘The Counselor’ to me is filled with things that, as a Mexican, I understand on that level,” the filmmaker said. “I know that death, and finality, and tragedy exist right around the corner in everybody’s life. And that once you cross that line, as Ruben Blades says, the world will not take you back.”
The filmmaker goes on to explain that his own crisis of faith, as a lapsed Catholic, has led to a deeper appreciation of the Ridley Scott film.
“I’m a lapsed Catholic, and I’m a Mexican Catholic, so I understand the tale of a man who thinks he controls the world and then dips his toe into a dimension that he thinks he understands, that he doesn’t, and that dipping of the toe completely destroys his life. I love that. There are very few crime movies that manage to tackle that incredibly existential limit,” he added.
Del Toro also brings up the fact that his own father was kidnapped, which gave him another perspective on the drug business that seems to be fictionalized so often in films. In fact, he said that the fact that the drug-dealing business is often reduced to a “good guys-bad guys fable” is often dangerous, in light of the harsh realities.
“I think ‘The Counselor’ has the sort of quotidian regality and relentless brutality that the business really has. And rarely do you see it portrayed in those terms,” del Toro said. “I also think there are just scenes in there that hold a strange fascination to me. The diamond seller played by Bruno Ganz, and how it serves as a viewpoint for the darkness of the rest of the movie, I think is just brilliant.”
