Denzel like you’ve never seen him before
Roman J Israel, Esq 12A cert, 122 min
Dir Dan Gilroy Starring Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo, Tony Plana, Amari Cheatom
Trivia question of the future: which film got Denzel Washington his eighth Oscar nomination? You’d be close with Fences (that was his seventh) or whatever his ninth turns out to be. But Roman J Israel, Esq is destined to be remembered mainly for the fact it has earned Washington another Oscar nod. A Washington vehicle in the purest sense, its whole reason for being is the fact that he’s in it.
Thankfully, he’s great. Ringing the changes with every role these days, Washington builds his acting around a hard, inner-core persona that’s always there when you search for it – a kind of stubborn kernel of Denzelness, up for a fight, or at least a serious argument.
Roman J Israel, Esq, argues with everyone on screen, partly because it’s his job, as a lawyer idealistically devoted to helping low-income clients in Los Angeles, and newly thrust into the benighted courtrooms when his partner – their firm’s real front man – suffers a heart attack.
But it’s Roman’s personal style that sticks out a mile. He lurches up the steps of civic institutions in dated, ill-fitting clothes, his hair an unruly afro. If America had an NHS, he’d be wearing their specs from the Seventies. Washington even took out the dental cap he’s worn since high school, leaving a slightly dorky gap between his two front teeth, as befitting a character who’s spent far more effort collecting Charles Mingus on vinyl than bothering with the orthodontist.
Roman is something of a savant, the wizard behind the curtain of his soon-to-be-defunct firm, who can recite line and letter of American law and remembers the exact dates of every case he’s read. He’s also an activist of long pedigree, a collegeunion windbag gunning for socially conscious reform within a system that stigmatises the poor. If he gets the chance to bend your ear on this matter, he’ll bend it to the floor.
You might not always want to be in the same room as Roman, but as a specimen of an eccentric title character, he’s consistently fascinating. Dan Gilroy, the writerdirector, clearly relishes protagonists you’d cross the street to avoid in daily life – he gave a comparable part to Jake Gyllenhaal as the scummy video journalist in 2014’s Nightcrawler.
The other people who come into Roman’s orbit, including Colin Farrell as a slick but inquisitive new boss, and Carmen Ejogo as a fatigued civil-rights volunteer, have a job on their hands figuring out what to do with him. And so, in all honesty, does the movie, which makes feints in various directions – crusading advocacy drama? Paranoid fable? – but never gathers the momentum to make a break for it in any one of them.
No, Gilroy’s film is stuck at all times with Roman himself, and there’s a perverse commitment to how it just lumps itself in with this uneasy, self-pitying outcast and watches itself unravel accordingly.
When they call a film characterdriven, it’s usually implied that we’re getting somewhere, rather than just slamming on the brakes or performing a series of awkward three-point-turns in the middle of rush hour. As it happens, Roman doesn’t even own a car – in Los Angeles, this is the surest proof that he’s got a screw loose – and he’s not to be trusted behind the wheel, as proven by a late sequence in which he hires a U-haul truck and trundles off into the desert, in terror of the bad decisions catching up with him.
He doesn’t tarry for long – it’s just one of the many detours Gilroy attempts by way of plot. But it’s typical of this strange, frustrating, itchily compelling film that we’re trying out so many possible outcomes for size. None quite fits – especially not the final one – but the man at the centre nags at you and won’t go away. TR