Roman J. Israel, Esq.

After his new movie drew a negative response at the Toronto Film Festival, writer-director Dan Gilroy (2014's Nightcrawler) made a valiant attempt to save the film by trimming 13 minutes off the run time, and re-editing it so that certain plot events happened sooner in the film.  I have not seen the original cut of Roman J. Israel, Esq., so I cannot judge how different the film was then compared to what is on screens right now.  What I can say is that the final film comes across as lifeless, with a lead performance by Denzel Washington that can only be described as "off".

With his wild hair and his face hidden behind an extra large pair of glasses, Denzel Washington looks uncannily like one of Eddie Murphy's comic characters.  Watching him up on the screen, I kept on waiting for Washington to slip on a fat suit, and start making fart jokes.  Regardless, his titular role sees him as some kind of Rain Man-like savant lawyer.  He's socially awkward, brilliant, and has never quite gotten the recognition he deserves.  As the film opens, he works for a two-man criminal defense team.  His boss has always served as the "face" of the firm, attending trials and meeting with clients, while Roman has stayed in the background, doing the research and telling his boss how to go about the legal cases they handle.  But now, his boss has suffered a heart attack that eventually is fatal, and Roman must go out into the open for the first time in years.

Roman does not do too well in the outside world.  He may be good at memorizing legal facts and making a case, but he's terrible at dealing with people.  When he has to represent his client in a courtroom, he causes such a scene over a tiny detail with the Judge that he is found in contempt.  And in a later scene, he will tell off a district attorney, which puts the law firm he works for in jeopardy.  Okay, so Roman is supposed to be kind of an awkward genius, the sort who is brilliant, but just doesn't do well with people or in social situations.  The problem is, Gilroy's script never makes him out to be as brilliant as he's presented.  He actually comes across as a bad lawyer.  And when he tries to speak to some women at a preparation for a protest rally, he ends up offending them and not realizing why.  Maybe some humor could have been drawn from these situations, but the movie never finds it.  And while I know that the character he is playing is supposed to be socially awkward, the way Washington plays him, he never comes across as a real person or a character.  It's a performance, and a rare bad one from him at that.  We're watching him act awkward, rather than creating a genuine performance.

In order to tell us how brilliant Roman is supposed to be, we have the film's love interest, Maya (Carmen Ejogo), who practically hangs on his every word and constantly tells him how wonderful he is.  The audience does not get to share in her opinion, because it never comes close to making Roman into somebody worth caring about.  They go on a dinner date together, and she is practically in tears over how inspiring he is to her.  Again, we don't see it, so the character comes across as someone who was inserted into the script to tell us how we're supposed to feel about the main character.  Yes, instead of letting us make our own opinions about him, the movie provides us with a character who does nothing but fawn over him.  This is kind of how the movie goes.  Roman acts awkward in some kind of situation, and people react, either positively or negatively.  This portion of the movie is merely lifeless.  But when it starts to try to be a thriller, it becomes laughable.

At some point in the film, Roman makes a shady deal with some people that nets him some serious money. (For the sake of spoilers, I'm trying to be vague here.) With the dirty money, he starts living the good life, taking a vacation, buying nice clothes, and moving to a luxury apartment.  Naturally, it all goes sour quickly, and Roman becomes paranoid.  There's an unintentionally comical scene where Roman is driving a U-Haul truck, and he thinks every car on the road is tailing him.  Washington overacts here and tries to create a sense of dread, but all he does is make you wish you were watching one of his better performances, such as in Fences just one year ago.  But nothing can compare to the film's final moments, which try to be tragic and uplifting all at once, and fail at both.

Perhaps Roman J. Israel, Esq. was a lost cause from the start, and no amount of editing or tampering could have saved the film.  After all, the character never grabs our attention, and its star is having a rare off-day here.  Regardless, what we have here is another prestige project that went seriously awry somewhere, or maybe it was rotten from the word go.  This is the kind of movie that makes you want to take the director and its star aside, and ask them what they thought they were doing.

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