‘Roman’ wastes Washington

Increasingly predictable Years melt away

IBy Mark Kennedy

t’s getting close to Oscar season and that means it’s time for an early prediction. Ready? Here goes: The Academy Award for Worst Title of a Motion Picture will surely go to “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”

This complex, untidy but ambitious film starring a brilliant Denzel Washington deserves better. At one point it was called “Inner City,” which might actually be worse. But just labeling it after its quirky and fictional lead character is a cop out, like calling a film “Andy Kaufman” instead of “Man on the Moon” or “Vincent Van Gogh” instead of “Lust For Life.”

The difficulty may be because this is an unusual character journey that chews on huge issues not frequently tackled on film. Directed and written by Dan Gilroy, “Roman J. Israel, Esq, “traces the fall from grace of a man not in the predictable way when he hits rock bottom but how a broken person actually rises in wealth and esteem.

But Gilroy, who has written dark indies like “Nightcrawler” and big budgets like “Kong: Skull Island,” seems to struggle with what film to make. It often feels like a small, intellectual film is rattling around inside the bones of a more predictable Hollywood legal thriller, mirroring the film’s conflicted lead.

Washington plays Israel, an attorney in modern-day Los Angeles who for decades has been the quiet, backroom brains of a two-person criminal defense firm until he’s called upon to step forward. He’s somewhat illequipped to do so — his ratty suits are ill-fitting, his glasses are unfashionable and he listens to an iPod with those old orange-foam headphones.

Yet Israel is an old-school civil rights warrior who is a lonely genius — someone calls him a “savant” and another says he’s a “freak” (both sound about right.) He prefers to pore over legal briefs in his humble apartment while eating peanut butter sandwiches than drive around in a flashy car. (He walks everywhere, which in Los Angeles signifies borderline insanity).

Thrust into the real world, Israel struggles. He may have the entire California legal code memorized, but he’s blunt and unsocial and doesn’t know how to find his email. “Public speaking is usually something I’m encouraged to avoid,” he confesses.

When his cocoon is finally broken, Israel must fend for himself and try to keep his principles, which becomes harder when he falls into the orbit of a slick defense attorney (Colin Farrell, LOS ANGELES, Nov 14, (AFP): She was an Oscar-winning femme fatale and co-star of James Stewart, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra. He was a stage actor 29 years her junior from a British housing project.

Four-times married Gloria Grahame’s unlikely love affair with Peter Turner ought to have been the stuff of Hollywood legend and yet it is a story that has largely been ignored — until now.

“Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” a major new movie starring Annette Bening and Jamie Bell, chronicles their profound but heartbreaking relationship in the years before Grahame’s death at the age of just 57.

Reversing the trend for graying Lotharios playing opposite actresses decades younger, 59-year-old Bening and former child star Bell, 31, share passionate scenes in the biopic, which has earned both actors widespread acclaim.

Bening told AFP she hadn’t worried about the age difference between her and her young co-star, who shot to fame at the age of 14 as a pint-sized ballet dancer in “Billy Elliot” (2000).

“I’ve played opposite men that were older than me my whole life,” she said on the red carpet for a gala screening of the movie as part of the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest in Hollywood on Sunday.

“Very rarely have they been the same age,” she said, describing

wonderfully understated), who offers a new, snazzy lifestyle. Carmen Ejogo plays a community organizer — the angel to Farrell’s devil. Which will Israel choose? He admits he’s “tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful.” Can idealism be bought?

Washington has done everything he can to inhabit this odd man. He shambles along with a heavy gait, lugging a heavy case and constantly pushes his glasses up with a finger. As he changes, Washington does, too — flashing a forced smile, losing his tics. Set against a Los Angeles that seems in constant flux thanks to never-ending construction, the film mirrors the remaking of its lead character.

Gilroy has peppered the script with some great lines — “Purity can’t survive Bell as “a pro who has gravitas as a human being, a really good man.”

Bening, married to octogenarian Warren Beatty for 25 years and, like Grahame, a mother of four, went out of her way to praise director Paul McGuigan, screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh and the many other men in the cast and crew.

“We did have a great group of men working on this movie and I just wanted to bring that up because men are getting a lot of flak these days,” she said.

Bell, too, said the age gap between him and his four-time Oscarnominated co-star had been of little concern, although he admitted being intimidated by her acting pedigree.

“It makes you raise your game when you are working with someone you know is in a different league,” he said.

“You know that you have to go an extra mile just to be on level terms with them, so I was very grateful for her trust and support.”

Despite appearing early in her career in feel-good classic “It’s A Wonderful Life” (1946), Grahame was often cast as an affluent seductress or gangster’s moll in film noir.

The one-time neighbor of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall won an Oscar for a nine-minute supporting role in “The Bad and the Beautiful” in 1952, a record at the time for the shortest performance to take the statuette.

in this world” and “My lack of success is self-imposed” — that Washington almost whispers. The film is also wonderfully scored, with 1960s and ‘70s soul songs as rich as the dialogue — Al Green, Marvin Gaye, The Spinners and George Clinton.

But there are frustrations, too. Israel is stubbornly lost in the ‘70s, but has an iPod and a flip phone, a transparent attempt by the filmmakers to have their cake and eat it, too. And if he’s such a savant, why can’t he figure out better choices? (You’ll be able to see how this film ends 10 minutes before it happens.) His love interest seems tacked on and the film also raises questions it never really answers — like, can the old civil rights strategies really work in today’s fragmented identity politics? (AP)