Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq., which screened on late Sunday night at the Ryerson, is a whipsmart, cunningly performed, immensely satisfying film in so many ways. Such a skillful job of character-building on Gilroy’s part, layer upon layer and bit upon bit, and such a finely contoured performance by the great Denzel Washington.

My only hang-up is that I wanted a different ending. Not that Gilroy’s ending is “bad”, per se, but I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want it. 

Otherwise this is such a brilliant, invigorating and fully believable film for over-30s — milieu-wise, legal minutiae-wise, Asperger’s-wise. It’s my idea of pound cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries…give it to me. You can take a terrific bath in this film and never feel unsatisfied that the story isn’t quite delivering the way you want it to.

Until the last 25 or 30 minutes, that is, but even then it’s not a fatal problem, just an air-escaping-the-balloon one.

Alas, I have to awaken at 6:30 am for an 8:30 am screening of Chappaquiddick, which I hear is quite good, and it’s 1:28 am now.

7:01 am update: Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman agrees with me — a wonderfully detailed Gilroy character, superb Washington acting but with a less-than-satisfying third act:

“The way Roman J. Israel, Esq. is set up, the film should be building to a moral-legal confrontation that tests everyone involved. Instead, it’s content to be a character study; but the audience, after a while, may not be so content.

“Roman gets assigned to the case of a young man (Niles Fitch) accused of murder (he tagged along when his buddy killed a convenience-store clerk). After a while, Roman goes through with an action that seems, in movie terms, to be justified: He turns the identity of the killer over to the victim’s relatives, gathering a private reward of $100,000. Legally, it’s a dicey thing to do, but no one innocent has gotten hurt, and Roman uses the money to put himself through a transformation that feels good.

“He buys real suits. He rents a fabulous apartment. He brushes back his hair. He scarfs honey-and-turkey-bacon donuts. He goes on a date with Maya (Carmen Ejogo), who runs a non-profit and, in her small way, is carrying on the dream of Roman’s formative era. The audience surveys all of this and approves, because Roman J. Israel, Esq. looks like a guy who could use a break.

“But the reward money comes back to haunt him. And that seems, in the end, a little facile. The movie turns into a war of signifiers, an archetypal L.A. battle pitched between going-for-the-bucks and holding-on-to-your-values. We’ve seen that battle before, a few too many times, and Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t play it out in a particularly satisfying way. It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.”

A chat with Darren Aronofsky at 5:30 pm, a Roy Thomson Hall showing of The Mountains Between Us at 6:30 and then a 9 pm screening of Dan Gilroy and Denzel Wahington‘s Roman J. Israel at 9 pm, which of course won’t start until 9:25 or 9:30 pm, if that.

Everyone’s seen it by now, so please have at it. Please understand that if you say you really liked it, you’ll automatically be defining yourself as an unsophsticated, popcorn-inhaling boob…no offense.  We’re all friends here.

Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! is about the madness, the mob, the awfulness, the vulgarity, the end, the abominations, Dr. Phil, the poison, the ego monsters and rampant obscenities and tables of half-drunk 20something girls wailing with laughter in bars…it’s about every unfortunate social horror of the 21st Century, manifested in an obviously allegorical form. 

This is definitely a Hollywood Elsewhere kind of horror film, or one that’s about much more than chills and shivers. Just as making people laugh is the lowest form of humor, simply trying to scare people is the lowest form of horror.

It doesn’t matter if you think the mother! effects are super-cool or run-of-the-mill. It doesn’t matter if the octagonal Victorian home that Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence are living in has a garage or a driveway. Because it’s not about the home or even the characters, but the world beyond and the realm within.

Anyone who sees mother! and concludes that Aronofsky is some kind of cold manipulator without a conscience or humanistic concerns…well, they’re not paying attention. His latest (which by my yardstick is easily one of his best, or certainly at par with Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream) is as valid and pungent a piece of social criticism as Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (which was about…what, the erosion of moral values and the waning influence of Christianity in the early to mid ’60s?) and Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (the self-loathing and lack of values among the bourgeois elite).

mother! is about…well, social rot and corrosion and the neurotic hunger for fame, about marriage and trust and social apocalypse, and possibly even Aronofsky’s past failings or shortcomings as a husband…who knows? It’s certainly about the fact that marriage to an intense creative guy can have its occasional rough spots.

It’s definitely a movie for upscale, review-reading, smarthouse audiences. It’s not aimed at your typical horror crowd. It’s an art film that uses the trappings of horror to make its points. Somebody (Aronofsky?) said after the Venice Film Festival screening it’s an allegory about global pollution and climate change. Okay, that works, but it’s not what I saw. 

For me, mother! may be the single most profound explanation or dramatization of the saying that “hell is other people.” It was to be seen and wrestled with. Especially if you’re married or living together.

Thomas Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (Weinstein, 11.24) is an eccentric, visually unconventional period drama — that much is certain. 

The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public. 

This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.

The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.

In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ’60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.

The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.

This visual signature will constitute a huge draw for cinema dweebs, who will no doubt celebrate the audacious yesteryear novelty of such an approach, but average popcorn viewers are probably going to feel a tad confused and disoriented as they try to process what boils down to an experimental arthouse way of shooting a movie, and a curious historical biopic at that.

Gomez-Rejon and Chung deserve approval for choosing a highly unusual method of telling a story that — be honest — your average American moron is going to have very little interest in to begin with.

I can’t honestly say that the screenplay, penned by 34 year-old Michael Mitnick, really sang for me. It struck me as overly 21st Century in its adherence to certain colloquial signatures and attitudes, but at least it’s a dutiful, reasonably literate stab at an ornate subject that doesn’t exactly lend itself to dramatic convention.

I for one was excited and intrigued all through The Current War, but at the same time I was telling myself “this is great, fascinating stuff but it’s not gonna make a dime.” Cheers nonetheless to everyone involved, including distributor Harvey Weinstein, who needs a hit at this stage.

I really wish I had time to get into this more, but Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is screening at 9 am, and it’s now 7:57 am. And right after that is a screening of Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. I’ll wade into this a bit more during the early and mid-afternoon hours.

If you want to dance through the saga of what history has generally referred to as “the war of currents”, here’s a Wiki page summary.