Roman J Israel, Esq

Three years after his direc­to­r­i­al debut, Night­crawler, acclaimed screen­writer Dan Gilroy offers anoth­er riff on the weak­ness at the rot­ten core of human nature, albeit this time in a far more clas­si­cal reg­is­ter. In a straight­for­ward­ly awards-bait­ing role, Den­zel Wash­ing­ton plays Roman Israel, a defence attor­ney whose right­eous­ness and pro­found ded­i­ca­tion to altru­is­tic work makes him stand out from his peers.

That is, until he dis­cov­ers incon­sis­ten­cies in the papers of the boss he looked up to for most of his career. When he meets rich, ele­gant and ami­able attor­ney George (Col­in Far­rell), Israel is already re-eval­u­at­ing his high moral stan­dards. Look­ing for direc­tion in a world where the dis­tinc­tion between good and evil now seems blurred, Israel is soon seduced by George’s laid-back atti­tude and charm. It isn’t long before he com­mits an ille­gal and uneth­i­cal act that haunts him even as he final­ly enjoys the plea­sures of mate­r­i­al success.

Despite a vivid inter­pre­ta­tion from Wash­ing­ton and a sound­track full of jazz and blues, Gilroy again strives to keep the film in the realm of the alle­gor­i­cal. The arti­fi­cial look of the images and the lim­it­ed num­ber of char­ac­ters give an odd claus­tro­pho­bic and sur­re­al feel to pro­ceed­ings. Yet where the clin­i­cal aes­thet­ic of Night­crawler com­plet­ed its nihilis­tic world­view, the moral cen­tre of Roman J Israel, Esq is nev­er lost, and Gilroy does not delight in Israel’s sin­ful ways.

If the film plays with Washington’s screen per­sona of moral for­ti­tude, it does not destroy it. In fact, the film’s ​‘whole­some Den­zel Wash­ing­ton’ per­for­mance is per­haps its biggest strength. Still, the actor’s tal­ent for demon­stra­tive per­for­mances feels restrict­ed in the role of a reclu­sive, social­ly awk­ward man. Clear­ly con­ceived as a moral­i­ty play, the awk­ward­ly titled film is too con­trived and pre­dictable to effi­cient­ly deliv­er the emo­tion­al punch it aims for.