Directed by Dan Gilroy
Starring Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo
Rated PG-13
Even though he’s one of the best-known and most honored actors in the history of the movie business, Denzel Washington finds an entirely new register in “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”
As the Los Angeles attorney whose name gives the latest movie from writer-director Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler”) its perplexing title, Washington abandons his typically suave demeanor. This is a reinvention: He’s awkward, uncomfortable and beset by social anxieties as the scholarly figure, whose preternatural expertise when it comes to the legal code is matched only by his inability to cope with the rapid pace of modern life or to embrace the flexible morality sometimes required to truly prosper in it.
Gilroy’s second movie plays as a sibling to the L.A.-set “Nightcrawler,” in which Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a freelance video journalist who specializes in filming violent incidents and selling the sensationalized footage to the local news.
Both films explore life on the margins of ostensibly respectable industries in the sprawling Southern California megalopolis and they’re each studies of the sort of characters consumed by their fields to the point where there’s no separating their personal and professional lives.
Like its predecessor, “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” benefits from the rich hues of Robert Elswit’s cinematography, which captures a strong sense of malaise and sadness in both the gritty streetscapes occupied by the title character and within the more familiar, sleek environs of glossy downtown skyscrapers or the beaches and resorts of Santa Monica.
The movie is driven by these textures, to which one could add the jazz-laden soundtrack — it’s a mood piece in which the story is defined by the character’s war with himself, in which his steadfast belief in living a life that never deviates from his closely held principles is called into stark question.
There’s a plot, in which Israel finds himself displaced from the firm where he’d worked as the man-behind-the-scenes for decades and subsequently faced with material temptations while working for a high-powered boss (Colin Farrell) at a marquee firm.
It functions as little more than a thinly drawn vessel for Washington to take hold of this lonely man disguised behind a big afro, enormous glasses and an anonymous shuffle — a backroom existence that’s tested when the door is opened to the rest of the world — and to make it powerfully his own.
