Nine days after Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq. has been trimmed by 12 minutes and to some extent re-edited, elite L.A. journos have been invited to see the “new” Roman J. Israel a few days hence. And in the morning yet — bagels, coffee and scrambled eggs at 9 am, the movie at 10 am, and then Gilroy and star Denzel Washington sitting for a q & a around noon.
A month and a half ago I conveyed how much I loved the first 85% to 90% of of Roman J. Israel. I called it “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.
I loved the specificity of Denzel’s stuck-in-the-past attorney character (the old-fashioned earphones, the modest apartment, the odd ’70s dress style, the music he listens to, the Asperger’s social tics), and that I was really pulling for the guy, and that a feeling of comfort came over me when he bought a couple of nice suits and lost the ’70s Afro and started going out with Carmen Ejogo‘s Maya, in some ways a kindred spirit of Roman’s and vice versa.
Then the thing happened and I was saying “this is how it ends? I don’t want this. I don’t like this.” But I so loved the film right up to this point.
“Roman is a brilliant guy,” I explained to a friend this morning. “I understand that for dramatic purposes he needs to be in a difficult or desperate place at the end of Act 2, but Gilroy should have somehow figured a way out of this, some clever-ass, end-run gambit that involves Denzel’s amazing recall and generally phenomenal brain-power. He pulls something off, lucks out, fortune smiles, etc.”
I just think it’s a bad idea to create a complex guy with flaws and character ripples and attributes, and then show him going through a fairly profound life-change that feels good and calming all around, and then pull the rug out. That really didn’t work for me.
I understand that we need to wipe the Toronto slate clean and see how the new version works and then go from there. I get that. I’m ready to absorb and possibly adjust.