After decades spent writing novels of increasingly muscular beauty, Cormac McCarthy had his first commercial success just before his 60th birthday. Since the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, his stature—critical and popular—has grown steadily. In 2006, aged 73, he won the Pulitzer Prize, and an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey, for The Road. A year later the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of his novel No Country For Old Men swept the board at the Oscars. Now, in his 80th year, he has provided the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s new film, The Counselor, which comes out on 15 November. It will be perhaps his most visible work yet.
McCarthy, in short, has had the ideal writing life: no unrepeatable early successes; no mid-life peak; no senescent descent into obscurity, irrelevance, bloodlessness. His writing life has been one 50-year-long upward trajectory.
Assuming, that is, The Counselor is a success. A brief synopsis of the plot: the Counselor (Michael Fassbender) is a likeable lawyer who gets involved in a major drug smuggling venture. The deal goes south, coincidences pile up, his (relatively) clean hands look dirty, and he is duly punished.
Judging from the screenplay, published by Picador ahead of its cinematic release, McCarthy may well have reached his “late style”: the point at which artistic convention, order and propriety are discarded and replaced with, in Edward Said’s words, “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction”. Accordingly, there is plenty in the screenplay to alienate and confuse. The script is heedless of motive, sparse on context, and the dialogue is never between more than two characters. So little attention is paid to the film’s plot that even its actors have claimed not to understand it. It is also makes for harrowing viewing.
McCarthy writes intensely visual novels of action and suspense, bursting with cinematic elements and snappy dialogue. These are novels that beg to be filmed. And yet, with the exception of
No Country for Old Men—a novel that began life as a screenplay McCarthy wrote in the 1980s—film adaptations of his novels have not fared well.
All the Pretty Horses, which came out in 2000, was a critical and commercial flop. It’s not hard to see why. The film makes too many mistakes to mention. Casting a 30-year-old Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz as teenage lovers was one misstep, giving the film the feel of a National Theatre family show. But chief among its many blunders is its fidelity to the source text. As McCarthy explained in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal, “The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that...And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.” The resulting film is so truncated that at times you forget you’re watching the film itself and not a trailer.
John Hillcoat’s equally faithful 2009 adaptation of
The Road fared better. It’s a sensitive and skilful piece of film-making: inventively shot, buoyed by an atmospheric score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and centred around two touching performances from Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. But it is hard to watch the film and not feel that it’s all—whisper it—rather pointless.
What is it about McCarthy’s novels that resists cinematic adaptation? One difficulty is the sentences. Part Hemingway-esque minimalism, part lyrical naturalism, part antique and quasi-Biblical prophesying, McCarthy’s prose creates effects that are untranslatable to film. Take, for example, the description of a beheading in
Blood Meridian: “He was sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning towards the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.”
The substitution of images for prose is more than an aesthetic loss; it’s also a moral one. McCarthy’s novels are full of horror—incest, murder, infanticide, cannibalism, necrophilia; without the artistry of his language to mediate and redeem the horror, horror is all we see. In
The Road, for instance, there is a scene where the protagonists, a man and his son wandering through post-apocalyptic America, come across an abandoned tractor-trailer. The man sets fire to a wad of paper and uses its light to look inside. It illuminates a huddle of rotting corpses. The man turns away and lets go of his makeshift torch. “The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.” Briefly we see the image of a rose against a backdrop of death and decay. Visualised literally on film it would look absurd. In the novel it is an image which reminds us of the beauty our world, reminds us what we have to lose.
Another obstacle to translating McCarthy to the screen is his habit of denying the reader access to aspects of the story. Many of his novels take place around the Mexico/US border, and when his characters speak Spanish, their words are not translated. McCarthy often doesn’t report how characters react at pivotal emotional moments. And at crucial moments of decision-making we are given no insight into a character’s mind. All of which has led his critics to complain that his novels are not “
much interested in consciousness”.
But McCarthy is also aware that the novel is a collaboration between writer and reader. The characters are breathed into being in the reader’s mind; they become a part of us. The strange feeling we get when we read McCarthy’s novels, then, is that we are both sharing in the characters’ experience while
allowing them their privacy. When the forbidden lovers of
All the Pretty Horses share their first kiss naked in a moonlit lake, McCarthy writes: "Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch.
Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said."
It is the most intimate moment of the novel and we are kept out of it by the reported speech: “He said her name.” It is the only non-direct speech in the passage. Her name is her individuality and we do not see it pronounced. Let them have this moment, McCarthy is saying; allow them their privacy. Unlike the cranes, we are not voyeurs.
But McCarthy knows that this can’t be captured in the movies. And in contrast to his novels, there is no privacy in
The Counselor. Here are the first words of the screenplay: "The counselor’s condominium bedroom…The view is from the rear of the bed and of two figures in the bed. The dialogue is muffled at times by the bedcovers and it therefore appears in SUBTITLES on the screen." Whether or not Ridley Scott sticks to this direction, McCarthy clearly wants us to know that we’re watching something we shouldn’t be watching.
He pushes us further still. The snuff film is a recurrent motif in the
The Counselor. A snuff film’s viewer not only takes pleasure from murder but commissions it: “The consumer of the product is necessary to its production,” Brad Pitt’s character, Westray, says to the Counselor when things start to go wrong. “You can’t watch without being implicated in a murder.” He goes on to describe a gruesome snuff film he has heard about. (NB Spoilers to follow).
Later, the Counselor has given up all hope of finding his kidnapped fiancé. He receives a package: a black box, the shape of a DVD case. “Suddenly he realizes what it is and he turns and drops it onto the bed like something hot and clutches at his face, his hands clawed.” The implication—which remains unconfirmed—is that this is a snuff film featuring his fiancée. But it is the audience who do the work. Westray’s earlier description has planted the horror in our minds and now our imagination brings it back into being, puts it inside that black box. We turn this empty vessel into unspeakable horror: “The consumer of the product is necessary to its production.” There is no redemption.
For McCarthy, a novel’s reader shares in the experiences of the novel’s characters. Under the author’s guidance, the reader knows when to look away. A film’s viewer, however, is a voyeur, watching from a distance and taking pleasure in the fate—good or bad—of its characters. Will this extraordinary screenplay make for a successful film? Who knows. It is reproachful of an audience whose existence has brought it into being. But it is, at least, purely cinematic.
