Published nearly 200 years ago, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” tells of a man who falls asleep during the colonial era and wakes up two decades later, after the American Revolution, to find himself living in a different nation. This notion of a long sleep and a rude awakening is tailor-made for social satire—think of Chance the gardener, the graying simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), who has spent his entire life cloistered in a rich man’s home but, upon the man’s death, is turned out onto the mean streets of Washington, D.C., and mistakenly adopted by Beltway types as a political savant. Now Dan Gilroy, writer-director of the creepy news satire Nightcrawler, brings us Roman J. Israel, Esq., whose title character, a self-styled “revolutionary” criminal defense attorney, has been holed up for decades in the Manhattan office of a two-man law firm. The awkward Roman writes brilliant defense briefs that his partner, William, delivers in court, but then William suffers a heart attack, his family shuts down the struggling firm, and Roman is ejected into the real world to fend for himself.
Great characters always have the potential to change; such is the case with George and, unfortunately, with Roman as well. Frustrated by the condescension of his well-heeled new coworkers and shamed by his own blunders in the plea-negotiation process, Roman is beaten and robbed one night by a scuzzy white hipster, and the trauma snaps him out of his long-held idealism. “I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful,” he tells George. Hoping to scare up some money and reward himself materially after years of sacrifice, Roman secretly commits an ethical violation that could get him disbarred, which then places him at the mercy of one of his clients. “Purity can’t survive in this world,” he tells Maya (Carmen Ejogo), a young activist who’s taken a shine to him. “The conditions are too barren.” Like old Rip Van Winkle, Roman has emerged from his slumber into a nation much changed, though the story turns tragic only when he decides to live there. v
Directed by Dan Gilroy
