The Counselor (dir. Ridley Scott, 2013, from a script by Cormac McCarthy), was underrated, and maybe more valuable for this reason: that it is an example of lazy reading – reviewing against expectation. The movie was misguidedly marketed as a thriller, a genre – in the laziest definition – cut from suspense if nothing else. This is entirely the obverse of the force Scott and McCarthy use to animate the movie. The Counselor's principle is the inevitable. In its universe, no threat becomes clear until its consequence is already too late to prevent.
Except, perhaps, in one case. The film's logic is disclosed early, gestured to in our encounter with the first of a ring of supporting characters spun in and out of the narrative. Reiner (Javier Bardem) is an ostentatious, sleazy, regrettably likable drug lord friend of Michael Fassbender's eponymous Counselor. His gated home is like a Miami clubhouse cut and pasted into the middle of the Texan desert. The excess is in more than just his bizarro Versace shirts and expensive furniture – it’s the liquid wealth of his deep blue pool, his verdant lawn that shimmers green enough to be mistaken for Long Island, which is, in certain vocabularies, about as far as you can get from Ciudad Juarez. What Reiner embodies is a spatial anachronism: what it looks like to fight against nature. “Nature”, that is, in the sense of the drought that surrounds him, but also the innate precariousness of border territory; palpable in everything of his is the sense of a world build for this: to fight inevitability.