There’s a scene in writer-director Dan Gilroy’s earnest legal drama where Denzel Washington navigates a street on the edge of LA’s Skid Row, agitatedly rattling the cradles on a row of pay phones in a desperate search for one that works. It illustrates succinctly how at odds with the modern world Roman Israel is. A brilliant legal mind, trapped in the body of a twitchy social misfit, he has all the hallmarks of a true genius-savant — the interpersonal skills of a yeast cell, dress sense of an Open University lecturer circa 1973 and an unshakeable conviction that justice for the poor and dispossessed is a cause worth fighting for. To this deeply unfashionable end, he’s spent decades toiling in the shadows at a tiny law firm, making trouble for The Man while compiling a vast, unwieldly brief he hopes will, one day, set the American legal system on its ear.
That the film opens with Roman drafting a motion to have himself disbarred from practising law indicates that things do not go entirely to plan. Propelled into the orbit of hotshot attorney George Pierce (Colin Farrell, on top form), Roman learns some uncomfortable truths about his business partner (now on his deathbed) and, despite the Jiminy Cricket-like presence of Carmen Ejogo’s saintly civil rights lawyer Maya, finds his moral compass seriously on the fritz.
It’s constantly on the brink of saying something profound about the relationship between justice and the law but can’t get the words out.
Not a premise brimming with originality, but one a filmmaker of Gilroy’s talents should be able to mould into something compelling — which he does, up to a point. It’s absorbing enough in places and the plot takes respectable turns here and there, even if it never attempts a full twist. The trouble is, it comes across as no more comfortable in its skin than does its central character. Every time it veers into straight-up legal thriller, or lightens the mood with a mid-point makeover sequence, it quickly reverts to dialogue-heavy default mode. It’s constantly on the brink of saying something profound about the tenuous relationship between justice and the law but just can’t get the words out. Which is ironic given the amount of words on offer.
The film’s saving grace is a simply mesmerising performance from Washington. In less skilled hands Roman could have been a Gumpy, Rain Man-ish collection of tics and mannerisms. Instead he’s a complex, disarmingly real human being whose eccentricities come not from a show-off actor’s bag of tricks but from Washington’s almost supernatural affinity with the character. If only the film he inhabits had the lucidity of Roman’s run-in with the payphones. Sadly, it doesn’t, which makes Washington’s performance all the more impressive.
