Roman J. Israel wears a towering Afro and shabby suits. He listens to Gil Scott-Heron and Pharoah Sanders. His filing system is a stack of 3x5 cards wrapped in a rubber band. Everything about him suggests a man out of time. But he's played by Denzel Washington, so if he's a dinosaur, he's a swaggering dinosaur.
The new movie from Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), Roman J. Israel, Esq. is about what happens to an individual when his ideals are no longer valued. Or, as Gilroy puts it in a recent phone conversation alongside Washington, "It's really about the burden and blessing of believing in something bigger than yourself."
Roman has spent the last 30 years as the behind-the-scenes brain for a powerful Los Angeles defense attorney. Then the boss has a heart attack, and Roman, an ornery man who doesn't play particularly well with others, is pushed upfront, into the world of trials and negotiations and bitter compromise. The new role fits him about as well as those shabby suits.
"He's not as capable in front of the camera, if you will, as he is behind the scenes," Washington says. "That's his strength, and suddenly he's thrust into this position that he's not equipped to handle." Washington was intrigued by the questions inherent to the character: "He chose a career in law. Why wasn't he a trial lawyer? Why did he end up in the back room for 30 years?"
Roman is an introverted, unreconstructed activist unmoored in the 21st century. He has a way with words: When a prosecutor describes a plea offer for one of Roman's clients as " a good deal," Roman is quick to retort: "It's an enema of sunshine." His boss's cases have fallen to a slick and powerful if principled attorney played by Colin Farrell (who, between this and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is quietly putting together a nice season). Roman becomes a cog in a big legal machine.
When Gilroy showed Washington the screenplay, Washington thought of Bayard Rustin. Rustin was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, a behind-the-scenes hero of the civil rights movement who didn't have a taste for the spotlight. (He was also gay, a fact that didn't set well with some civil rights leaders).
"We all might say, 'Oh, I want to be a leader of the people and get out there and make speeches,'" Washington says. "Bayard must have found out somewhere along the way that wasn't his strength, but he could support the public leaders, and that was his strength. They would come to him. Everybody looks at Martin Luther King, but Roman is more of a Bayard Rustin." Indeed, a photo of Rustin is pinned to the wall of Roman's apartment.
But Roman's selflessness has its limits, especially when his up-close view of the legal system leads him to see his hard work as futile. "I'm tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful," he explains. He wants to get his. And he makes the bad decision that sends the plot into motion and spirals him into a crisis of identity and conscience.
Gilroy, like his brother Tony (Michael Clayton), has a gift for making socially engaged movies that don't smack you upside the head with a message. There are no sermons in Roman J. Israel, Esq. It's all in the characters, the story and the setting.
"You can't write a message movie," he says. "You can write a movie if you're lucky that has some thought behind it, and maybe if you're lucky it's entertaining, engrossing and makes you think. That's something I aspire to."
