Denzel Washington (Training Day, American Gangster) vulnerable? Sure, we’ve seen that before. While more the exception than the rule, we have seen Washington play roles where his character doesn’t always have the answers or is susceptible to outcomes behind his control. These films include Flight, Man on Fire, Out of Time, John Q, Fences, and He Got Game. But scared? Outside of John Q, I don’t know if there’s a movie where one of his characters has been so frantic that he is completely hidden from the confident and poised Denzel that we expect and love. All of that changes in Dan Gilroy’s Roman J. Israel Esq., his follow-up directorial performance after blazing onto the Hollywood landscape with 2014’s Nightcrawler. When I first saw the preview for Roman J. Israel Esq., I thought this might be a throwaway film for Washington. In a year when there have been more than a few trailers that show a completely different picture than what the movie is actually about, this film might take the cake. The trailer, to me, portrays Washington’s character as a cocky hotshot lawyer who gets caught up in being a power-hungry monger. Heck, the trailer I just watched made it look like it was a comedy of all things. Nothing was further from the case. I might not have even seen this movie if Washington had not been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The movie got mixed reviews and only ended up with a 52% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. His nomination over James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Jake Gyllenhaal (Stronger), and Tom Hanks (The Post) surprised many, namely myself. As a result of the nomination, I was obligated to watch this movie, and I’m really, really glad I did. Roman J. Israel Esq. was a movie that, in my opinion, was marketed wrongly. Also, I felt this to be an underrated movie. Furthermore, while I still believe the Academy got this year’s Best Actor nominations correctly outside of this one (I would have given his nomination to Gyllenhaal ), I was remarkedly impressed with Washington’s performance as a neurotic and paranoid civil activist attorney with all of the good intentions in the world who also happens to fall somewhere on the Autism spectrum.
Washington’s performance as the title character isn’t the only reason to watch this film, but it is certainly the main one if you were forced to select one reason. Set in present-day Los Angeles, you’d think this movie was straight out of the 1970s if you looked at just its lead character. Israel (Washington) is pudgy. There has never been a movie in which his physical appearance looked worse. He sports an unkempt afro, wears oversized pilot glasses, gap-tooth that he frequently showcases with his goofy smile, and dresses in three-piece suits that haven’t been in fashion in decades and happen to still look baggy, despite him being 25 pounds overweight. He wears headphones connected to an old-school iPod wherever he goes. He also carries around a beat-up brown leather briefcase that wouldn’t even sell for $1 at a yard sale. He is part of a two-person law firm for the underprivileged in which his partner William Jackson is the face of the firm and does all of the trial work and meeting with clients while Roman does the research, writes the briefs, and advises him on what to do in each case. When his partner has a heart attack, Roman is forced to step in, at least in the short term.
We see Roman in a trial, and we learn right away that he is a very ethical and well-meaning defense attorney who will shoot you straight with everything he’s got. He’s not afraid to make a big splash in a small pond. But each time he starts speaking, whether, to a judge or a client, we instantly can tell why he is the half of the firm that does the behind-the-scenes work. We also learn that the firm is failing financially and that William is unlikely to recover from his comma. Roman is forced to shut the company’s doors (the timeline in this film is accelerated). Struggling to make ends meet, Roman tries to find work with the National Assembly for Civil Rights, an organization founded by Maya (Carmen Ejogo – It Comes At Night, Alien: Covenant), one of William’s friends. Unfortunately, they do not have a paid position they can offer him. So instead, he takes a job with George Pierce (Colin Farrell – Cassandra’s Dream, The Lobster), a successful defense attorney who sometimes gave lost cause cases he didn’t want to William and Roman. He recognizes Roman’s innate knowledge of the legal code.
At its most basic level, this movie is very, very simple. It’s really cut and dry if you want it to be. And if you want it to be, there’s nothing wrong with that. Without giving anything away, our protagonist runs into a little bit of trouble when something is dangled in his face that is too tempting not to take. The entire movie, except for its first and one of its last scenes, are set in what’s supposed to be a flashback. Roman himself is incriminating himself for something he has done. But it’s at this flashback scene, we see Roman breaches his ethics and everything that he stands for, and we are left with the frightened shell of a man that I presented in the first paragraph of this review. Instead of preaching his morals and trying to infuse an old-school mentality onto both a new wave of lawyers and criminals, Roman gets caught in his own situation, forcing him to begin living a paranoid lifestyle. And how the movie plays out isn’t anything galvanizing or anything that requires you to think. If you’re like me, this movie will draw comparisons to the fantastic A Simple Plan.
But if you dig deeper, you’ll see that other issues are trying to push themselves to the surface. You’ll see a man who’s frozen in the ideals of the past but living in a less moral world that corporations dominate with deep pockets that are more intense of processing people through the system rather than personalizing each case to determine right versus wrong. We look at how the American justice system has changed and how the idealism of past generations has swept us by. It digs deeper than it needs to. Some will love it for it. Some will hate it. Some will appreciate its somewhat failed attempts, while others will think that the movie is trying to be something it’s not. Regardless of how you feel about these issues, it’s a film worth watching. But I do wonder how I’d feel if anyone other than Washington was playing the lead role. I love Denzel dramas quite a bit more than I do his action movies (though I do enjoy this quite a bit as well). But I do enjoy it when he takes a chance on a film, and that’s what he does here. And he was rewarded with an Oscar nomination. I think you’ll be rewarded too if you give it a chance.
Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 8/10
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 8.5/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing 8.5/10
Cinematography 9.5/10 (transporting a 70’s looking Denzel into present-day LA worked brilliantly)
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 8.5/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
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