Roman J Israel Esq
Dan Gilroy (2017)
In Nightcrawler (2014), the writer-director Dan Gilroy successfully used an eccentric main character to reflect a broader cultural malaise. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest he intended something similar in Roman J Israel Esq. The title character, played by Denzel Washington, is a late-middle-aged lawyer, who has worked throughout his career in the same, two-partner Los Angeles firm. With an exceptionally keen legal brain but limited interpersonal skills, Roman has settled for a backroom role preparing briefs, leaving his senior and more extrovert partner to represent clients in court – and to run the firm, which specialises in pro bono work. The socially isolated Roman has also devoted himself to working, out of hours for many years, on proposals for justice reform. From the look of him and the poky apartment where he lives alone, he is firmly rooted, not to say stuck, in the 1970s. He wears an afro hairstyle and a burgundy three-piece suit to the office. The faces and inspiring words of political and civil rights activists – Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin – dominate the walls of his apartment. Roman’s prized possessions also include an iPod but the huge playlist is dominated by soul tracks from decades past. When his law partner suffers a massive heart attack, from which he dies several days later, Roman’s life is turned upside down. He makes appearances in court. He also discovers that the partner’s worst-of-both-worlds management of the business has flouted its professed ethical values and left it broke. Is Roman J Israel meant to represent a whole generation of lawyers, shaped by mid-twentieth-century civil rights culture, who, in the current decade, have had to face up to how little some aspects of the US justice system have changed, especially for African Americans, over the course of their working lives? Gilroy’s set-up suggests so but the moral of his story gets lost in a melodramatic, occasionally baffling plot.
Roman’s late partner had arranged, in the event of his death, for George Pierce (Colin Farrell), a hotshot young lawyer heading up a much bigger partnership, to take charge of things. Roman is ill-suited to working for the Pierce law firm but it’s not easy at his age – and with his CV and verging-on-Aspergic personality – to get another job. Pitching himself as a ‘long-haul revolutionary, full-time, in-house paid advocate’, he goes for an interview with a civil rights organisation. The interview is a disaster though Roman makes an impression on Maya (Carmen Ejogo), who manages the unit. George Pierce assigns Roman a couple of clients but things quickly go wrong. Derrell Ellerbee (DeRon Horton), arrested for the murder of a store assistant, insists that he’s innocent and tells Roman he’d be willing to testify against the man he claims committed the crime, Carter Johnson (Amari Cheatom). Roman’s mishandling of negotiations with the state attorney prevents a bargain being struck. When Ellerbee himself is murdered, his mother lodges a malpractice complaint against the firm and Pierce threatens Roman with dismissal. The murdered store assistant was a member of the Armenian-American community, which is offering $100,000 for information about the crime. Roman makes the pivotal decision to inform the community leaders, by anonymous phone call, about Carter Johnson. He later picks up the reward[1].
It’s not clear whether desperation or new-found cynicism, or both, impels Roman to do this. That’s no bad thing in itself but Roman J Israel Esq makes less and less sense from this turning point onwards. Roman puts his cash prize to instant use: he gets his hair styled, a couple of expensive suits, a nice pair of shoes; he enjoys a day at the beach and arranges to move to a penthouse apartment. Summoned by Pierce, he expects to lose his job but instead receives a hero’s welcome from the boss, who has (simply) settled the malpractice case and discovered that Roman is a brilliant legal mind. Pierce compliments him on his new dress sense and gives him a senior role in the firm. Maya contacts Roman and invites him out to dinner; he astonishes her by taking her to a very expensive restaurant and insisting on paying. As they say goodnight, she tells him his hair looks great. Roman’s guilty feelings, however, are already making their presence felt – they bring on a funny turn during the dinner with Maya, as she talks about her own struggle to reconcile fine ideals and harsh realities.
Soon afterwards, Roman and George Pierce go to meet with a client in custody: it’s presumably Roman’s lack of communication skills that prevents his asking Pierce, before they actually see the client, who he is. Carter Johnson, of course, and Pierce, after introductions, leaves Roman alone with him. Johnson tells Roman he knows that Ellerbee didn’t give his name to anyone but Roman (how does he know this?), that Roman must therefore have disclosed legally privileged information for personal gain. Although Maya credits him with renewing her idealism and Pierce, impressed by his example, is developing a social justice agenda for the firm, Roman can’t live with his bad conscience. Literally can’t live, as it turns out. As he prepares to hand himself in at a police station, he’s shot dead on the street by an unknown (to this viewer anyway) gunman.
Its ambitious themes make it hard to dismiss Roman J Israel Esq as merely a star vehicle – but it turns into one, thanks to the clumsy plot and to Denzel Washington’s sustained authority. His performance here is both more engaging and more inventive than the one he gave in Fences. Washington convincingly captures Roman’s combination of high intelligence and personal awkwardness. The hero’s office-bottom waddle is a fine piece of physical characterisation. Even with some surplus weight and a pair of spectacles, though, Washington is handsome and charismatic. He’s not a backroom boy; and the effect of Roman’s abrupt change of lifestyle and appearance is to make the star look more like his usual self. When Maya invites Roman to dinner, his stuttering, incredulous reaction is touching; funny too – but funny partly because it’s impossible to imagine that Denzel Washington ever struggled to get a date. Although the plotting around George Pierce’s conversion to Roman and his values is particularly weak, Colin Farrell is surprisingly convincing in the role – his blend of shrewd opportunism and callowness means that Pierce is credibly open to influence. Carmen Ejogo makes the best of the thin character of Maya.
As a prologue to the main action, the text of a pretend law suit, naming Roman J Israel as both plaintiff and defendant, appears on the screen and is read by Washington in voiceover. The thrust of the suit is that, in the course of the preceding three weeks, Israel’s behaviour has betrayed everything he believed in, that he deserves to be disqualified not only from practising law in California but also from the human race. This is a nifty, attention-getting opener but nothing more: Gilroy’s reprise of it, just before the climax, does little more than confirm the suspicion that three weeks is a very short time in which for all the above to happen. Gilroy closes on a solemn but hopeful note as George Pierce files on Roman’s behalf his magnum opus on reform of the criminal justice system. (This ending is rather odd too: Pierce stands waiting at a desk, through a large chunk of the closing credits, as a mildly disgruntled clerk logs the voluminous material.) Although Roman J Israel Esq fails as drama, Denzel Washington makes it entertaining and the interesting themes that don’t cohere give the film a tantalising quality. In spite of all that goes wrong with Dan Gilroy’s second feature, you come out looking forward to his third.
8 February 2018
[1] I didn’t understand why the $100k was still on offer when Ellerbee had been arrested, then killed before the case went to trial, but I probably missed something.