2024
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Jonathan Abrams
Juror #2 is perhaps what you could call "a film of ideas," which is nice, though it would be even nicer if it had more of a film to contain those ideas, rather than this observation of the failures of the U.S. criminal justice system here, or that discursion about the slipperiness of morality there, which to an unfortunate degree replace having a plot or even characters. The touchstone, of course—undoubtedly a conscious one on the part of all its principals, from screenwriter Jonathan Abrams to director Clint Eastwood to the entirety of its cast—would be 12 Angry Men (it's got a number in the title and everything, though the characters have actual person names). That's a film that's generally hailed, and I would not seek to contradict this assessment, as the singular masterpiece of American civic religion on film, in that it's somewhat bullshit, but the kind of bullshit that we need in order to believe in American society. So I'm actually not entirely sure why it is still popular, or at least any more popular than, for instance, 1950s Bible films, except that it's a very good and entertaining movie no matter how you slice it and everyone enjoys it when Henry Fonda essays moral certitude. Anyway, Juror #2 is a little strange: it uses a complete bullshit premise, but only in order to get to a place where it can cut the bullshit out, and get to how juries, or rather how human beings, who sometimes get jury duty, react to the cries of their consciences, as well as to having their moral convictions or their intellects challenged, or to simply being inconvenienced. It's an interesting exercise (it's also pretty easily watchable), even if I don't think it really succeeds, and may not have ever been able to succeed in anything like this configuration of screenplay and of talent. Yet the tantalizing prospect that it could've makes me more annoyed with it than otherwise, thanks to several unforced errors, many of which also come at the end, where they can do the most harm.
So, the bullshit that Juror #2 throws at you immediately is, despite being bullshit, some real cool stuff: in Savannah, GA, there is a man, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a seemingly decent dude with some kind of middle-class career that I have forgotten and doesn't really matter to the proceedings—ah, he's a journalist (but not one in any germane field)—who has recently knocked up his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) again, together going for a second try at a pregnancy after a late miscarriage tragically cut their last attempt short, and Justin has just been dragooned into jury duty. That would be kind of a bummer anyway, but the case is the murder of Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood—er, weird), alleged to have been pummeled and tossed over a bridge by her abusive lowlife of a boyfriend James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), following a violent spat at the local bar. Sythe maintains his innocence all throughout a trial prosecuted by the ambitious Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), who hopes to use a guilty verdict in this high-profile case to secure the forthcoming district attorney election; Sythe's own attorney Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) believes him, though this doesn't really translate into particularly effective representation. But you know who else believes him? Justin. Justin knows very well Sythe didn't do it, because Justin did. He left the same bar, drove through the same rain Carter was walking home in, hit something with his car, and while he assumed it was a deer at the time, he's pretty sure it was Carter now. Thus is his task laid out before him: convince these other eleven jerks that they can't be sure Sythe killed his girlfriend, while also refraining from, simultaneously, revealing himself.
Honestly, this premise is way too much fucking fun for this movie, and it irritates me. I don't know if it's really fair to say that Eastwood's reputation in the 21st century is as a maker of the glummest kind of quintessential Movies For Adults—that might just have been my personal bias thanks to a non-representative sample of his 21st century, especially the ungodly glum (and boring) American Sniper—and, having gone back and done (some of) my homework, I know that my bias wasn't entirely accurate anyway (The Mule is infinity percent more enjoyable than I think you'd expect from "Eastwood plays a destitute, lonely geriatric drug mule working for a Mexican cartel," and Richard Jewell is, despite its severe subject matter, more fun than not; Sully is pretty glum but earns it as the only avenue towards making any kind of dramatic film about Chelsey Sullenberger's feat of aviation), but here Juror #2 is pretty much living down to my stereotypes of Eastwood as a director. That's in a few ways—it's disagreeably unfocused, he leaves his actors to fend for themselves, it's spare and economical both in its shooting process (which might not help the actors either, and does not do so here) and visual scheme—but it's almost impossibly insensate to its own preposterousness, either as a desperate strategy, because the business of this movie is serious, or because (I assume this is less likely) it doesn't quite understand that what it's doing is fundamentally very silly. There are edits every now and again cutting to Hoult's "I AM DROWNING IN GUILT" reactions to various pieces of testimony, or the unwanted too-piercing insights of fellow jurors, that sort-of manage an absurdist humor; but I think they're funny on accident, and they're definitely not on purpose as far as Hoult goes.
This is not a prime concern, I suppose: it's not a comedy (though I'd probably judge The Mule "a comedy"), though by the same token it's not much of a thriller, and I think it is aiming for that, just as a matter of making a movie out of it, and I could grouse, for one thing, it goes just far enough that not going the rest of the way is disappointing. If 12 Angry Men is the touchstone, the silly thing there was that Fonda's Juror #8 was a strong logician and a rhetorical genius; Justin is such a down-the-middle intellect he can't easily tilt towards self-made disaster or masterful cunning, and the screenplay is aware of this to a sufficient degree that, while nobody bothered fixing it, it does make sure to get rid of his prime "ally" on the jury, ex-cop and justice system-skeptic Harold Chicowski (J.K. Simmons), the moment Chicowski manifests even the most nebulous threat to Justin, which is even worse because it means Simmons isn't in the movie anymore and Simmons is, give or take a Collette, by just some unspannable gulf the best actor in it, and I think the single figure in the whole project best-attuned to making this work equally towards all its various goals.
The rest of jury is semi-nobodies, with very barely sketched personalities so that I can't say they're transcending being semi-nobodies, and, as noted, they're mostly jerks—the one making the biggest impression is Cedric Yarborough, who's a jerk for a different reason than the other black juror, although it takes a while to get to why and it's still an exceedingly bad reason. (You know, elsewhere, I've barely-facetiously described The Mule as pretty much straight-up "woke," predominantly in a good way, and whatever Eastwood's politics are now, many years after flopping on stage with his chair bit, I suspect that they're strange, and cause him a great deal of personal torment, but it's a little questionable anyway that not only are the two black jurors for this white defendant the bloodthirstiest—I think that could be intentional social commentary, and potentially interesting, if fraught—but the one (Adrienne C. Moore) who gets the standard of proof in a criminal trial literally backwards, and seems to think murder verdicts normally get decided in five minutes, is a black woman.) It somewhat means that, in this thriller, Justin is simply sort of fighting his fellows' laziness and cognitive biases, and they're receptive enough to that, that he just has to crack the diehards, and a movie that feels like it ought to ramp up ultimately just doesn't; it also doesn't help that this was a really poorly-tried case. (Once the medical student on the jury (Chikako Fukuyama), who unfortunately does not graduate to Justin's new chief adversary, realizes that the injuries were all basically sustained in a single body blow, it's sort of baffling, not merely that the jury doesn't just vote straight "not guilty" afterwards, despite Justin's feeble volte-face, but that this was not part of the trial—the geography of the death, for sure, already pretty strongly suggests "it's so plausible that this chick could have gotten hit by a car that it seems likelier than not that she did.") Hoult is asked to hold the center of this and he's certainly present, though those aforementioned "drowning in guilt" expressions are basically the whole of his performance, except when he's being (intentionally) mild and manipulative; it's a technically good performance (when he's confronted by his wife he makes all the blood vessels in his face do some pretty amazing things), just not a very compelling one, nor one that ever defines Justin as anything beyond a sense of guilt surrounded by enormous amounts of blank space.
Well, I suppose that is to some degree the point. (Though it really suffers all the more in the shadow of that homework I did, with Tom Hanks, Paul Walter Hauser, and Eastwood himself offering very precise and very complete performances in all their Eastwood movies.) But the film's overriding purpose, or pair of purposes, anyway, isn't to be a cracking variation on the wrong man thriller, but to interrogate the juridical philosophy of the United States, and to examine the moral choices the participants of its drama make—sometimes these are the same thing—and it does this better, starting with how it stacks the deck against poor Justin, an ex-drunk who, really, did not have a single drink that night he killed somebody without even realizing it, but who the hell would believe either prong of that story; it's downright scabrous with Killebrew (Collette helps) and the way she represents an adversarial justice system that only cares about victories, even as Killebrew, as a human being, still has an ember of conscience that, thanks to her perception of her role in the machine, flickers into life entirely too late to be useful for anything; and it succeeded in convincing me, not that I need any convincing at this point, that Americans and possibly all peoples are too fucking dumb for democracy.
Or if that's too far (and I half-wonder if that face-melting "they didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he's innocent"—approximately ten seconds after, you know, the jury would've been charged with the real standard of proof, not even for the first time—is actually there simply to explain that standard of proof to an audience assumed to be that dumb), then at least it wants to let you know that a system that assumes that twelve random idiots who aren't even paid appropriately for their compelled service, while prosecutors receive multiples of the resources of public defender offices, and lie (or bullshit) without accountability in order to achieve wins at all costs, is simply not a system designed to produce good results. And that is kind of neat in its full-bore cynicism, especially in a recent filmography that includes Sully and Richard Jewell, when those two legal dramas are, respectively, about the upper echelons of our justice system being technocratic and out-of-touch or actively prone to tyranny, and then this one comes along to complete a little thematic trilogy, and brings it all the way down to the just-folks heart of the whole American (hell, Anglo-American) tradition of justice—the jury as the finder of fact—and says, "nope, that's pretty fucked up, too."
And there's a mounting cynicism that I did, after a fashion, start to enjoy as Juror #2 entered its endgame. One problem, the big problem, is that it pulls back so hard on it—the movie ends just a startling number of times, and each time it decides it's not quite the ending it wants, until finally it concludes with this messy moral furball that is, I grudgingly admit, "ambiguous" and "adult" in the way you may or may not want out your dramas, though I don't think it's very satisfying for this one. For the record, the ending I'd have preferred would just be the first, the one that most despises humanity and feels the nastiest, even if you might not be able to say you'd have done any different. (Maybe what you or I would have done different is to get Yarborough's character kicked off the jury for violating the judge's orders and openly saying things like "I'm going to convict him for being a member of a drug gang whether or not he murdered her.") That it retrenches into a strained defense of morality isn't "bad," but doesn't remotely feel like it's arisen organically out of the circumstances or characters, merely that Abrams wanted it.
The littler problem, though, which is more like a multiplier for the big problem, rather than something operating parallel to it, because it emphasizes that Eastwood and Abrams really just want to wrap this up in their deliberately-knotted moral bow, is that the movie just plum forgets that, by this point, the jury was leaning towards the other option, and the matter of how they shrugged and changed their votes now is abandoned, left to plummet into a straight-up narrative void. (It's especially void-like given that if Justin now has to convince them of the opposite of what he'd just convinced them of, this seems like some pretty fascinating plotting that, by no coincidence, the movie really needs to have had—it is more-or-less impossible to imagine how the med student, in particular, changed her mind.) It's a movie with stuff it wants chew over, and likewise a movie that does not have, in any appreciable way, any "bad scenes," as such—and Eastwood keeps it moving well enough, and cinematographer Yves BĂ©langer is indulged from time to time to prove that he can do really nice shadowy lighting set-ups, albeit without quite threatening the movie with "an actual aesthetic"; on the minus side, the "show the same event multiple times in flashbacks that don't start till long after the movie's started" gambit worked better in Sully—but it's less than the sum of its parts and much less than what's been promised by that awesome logline, "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, but on a jury."
Score: 6/10
I can't really refute any of your complaints, and a couple nagged at me but I didn't mention in my review (the non-personality of the jurors in particular... in some ways I'm glad I rewatched 12 Angry Men right before this because I caught all the nods and subversions; in other ways that viewing sequence was a mistake, in particular because Juror #2 is nowhere near as accomplished at characterizing its jurors as the former). But I guess I was just happier to ride along with its clenched-jaw, agonized take on the material from start to finish. The stupidity of the defense (and I suppose the prosecution given that Toni Collette ultimately lands on wanting real justice rather than just a win) is annoying, but I had little trouble hand-waving it in the name of the larger bullshit, as you say, of the premise. I still think the biggest writing hiccup is completely excising the crucial bit of jury deliberation that swung the verdict after the site visit.
ReplyDeleteOne matter that has not sat with me well since I watched it is the characterization of Sythe as unambiguously reformed and innocent. Wouldn't it be more of an interesting ethical dilemma for Justin on whether to incriminate him if he was more of a remorseless scumbag that most of the society would deem "should" be behind bars? Or, does his clean soul actually make Justin's guilt worse?
Yeah, I thought about rewatching 12 Angry Men and figured it couldn't possibly be in Juror #2's favor.
DeleteI dunno, I'd probably have left him just sort of a scummy dude. But if I were writing this I'd probably have gone even more "preposterous thriller" and had the victim be somebody Justin had intentionally killed (somebody who'd asked for it, not some random woman he doesn't know), but maybe that's just because that's what I initially thought Juror #2 *was.*
It may also have been worth mentioning (I don't believe either of us did) how Keifer Sutherland's AA sponsor/attorney has a moral quandary thrown in his lap, yet he's vanished from the movie rather than e.g. wrestling with the conflict between his legal duty and his presumptive concern that some innocent dude's going up the river.
DeleteGreat point. He basically is there to raise the stakes for Justin but could definitely have had his own arc
DeleteIt's actually an interesting legal question whether this would be an exception to privilege, because I'm not sure how the rules of professional conduct would intersect with this goofy scenario; after all, Justin's not exactly committing a crime--some manner of jury tampering--or actually subverting a legal proceeding, because all he's attempting to do is to get the guy he knows is innocent off. But it sure feels like it?
DeleteAh, they should've cut the attorney stuff anyway. You don't need *legal advice* to know "running a woman over and not reporting it till months later" looks bad.
Can't wait 'til they complete the epic Jury trilogy XD
ReplyDeleteReturn of the Juror.
DeleteOn a somewhat more serious note, I really do wish I could see the 90s preposterous thriller version of this movie starring, like, Jeff Bridges and Rebecca DeMornay (was gonna say Kiefer Sutherland but apparently he's already in the actual movie!)
ReplyDeleteSharon Stone knows he didn't do it because she banged the victim to death.
DeleteIncidentally, as for the Juror Trilogy, I'm getting a lot of search engine traffic for "Juror 1 Clint Eastwood" and I'm going to be way, way generous and assume those are typos.
Sigh, I know they're not typos.