Clint Eastwood’s latest project Juror #2 is rumored to be his final film after nearly 70 years in the entertainment industry and having directed 40 features. If that is indeed the case, the film both feels like a summation of a long, storied career and also, quietly, a repudiation. Eastwood has arguably produced at least five punctuation marks on his legacy already — it requires too many words to unpack this fully in the body of a review, but to varying degrees Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, The Mule, and, most recently, Cry Macho all play like elegies for either a way of life that the actor-director personified or Eastwood himself — so there’s considerable risk of folly in playing this game, even if the writing on the wall is brighter and larger than normal this time around (specifically, the filmmaker turned 94 earlier this year and his brand of understated dramas aimed at adults has so fallen out of favor that his longtime studio, Warner Bros., has all but dumped his theoretical swan song into a few dozen theaters without any marketing behind it). But let’s briefly humor the idea. Juror #2 is a typically stripped-down and unpretentious thriller of the sort that’s second nature for Eastwood. The filmmaker has long had a reputation for putting scripts in front of the cameras as sent to him (“shoot the first draft”) while most of his contemporaries prefer a drawn-out rewrite process as well a filming style that prioritizes expediency over endless tinkering on-set, and this latest film feels true to form on both counts. It can also be read as furthering the filmmaker’s much-debated while difficult to pin down “right-leaning” politics, specifically Eastwood’s distrust of institutions, the state in particular, and the importance of the individual in standing up to injustice when no one else will. Throw in a plaintive and understated piano-centric score (credited to Mark Mancina) and, well, this one’s likely to pass a blind taste test without much difficulty.
However, what’s compelling about Juror #2 is how much it complicates the idea of one man (as is typically the case) doing the right thing, particularly at great personal costs. The film stars Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp, a young husband and father-to-be placed into an impossible situation. Undertaking his civic duty and reporting to the courthouse to serve on a jury, Justin is impaneled on a murder trial, much to the consternation of his very pregnant wife Allison (Zoey Deutch), who’s due to pop any day now. The trial involves the defendant, James Michael Sythe (speaking of right-leaning politics, Gabriel Basso, most well known for playing JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy), a former gang member accused of beating his girlfriend to death after an argument and tossing her body over a bridge into a shallow ravine on a dark and stormy night. But as the opportunistic prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) lays out the facts of the case to the courtroom, the queasy air of familiarity to her account shakes Justin to his core. In flashback, we see Justin, a recovering alcoholic, fighting the urge to drink at the same roadhouse that Sythe and the dead woman were at that fateful night. As they continue to argue in the parking lot, Justin abandons the untouched drink and returns to his vehicle to drive himself home. Distracted by his thoughts and the driving rain, Justin’s truck accidentally hits something in the road. When he exits the vehicle to survey the damage, he can find no evidence of a victim, and guessing it must have been a deer that ran off, he drives himself home to Allison. Now, with such a preponderance of coincidences, it becomes harder to believe that it was actually a deer he hit.
Juror #2 wastes no time laying out the stakes for Justin if he comes clean. His AA sponsor and lawyer, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), is chillingly plainspoken in making the case that Justin’s history of DUIs means any claim that he was sober at the time of the accident would fall on deaf ears and that he’d go to jail for decades for vehicular homicide. Although Sythe takes the stand in his own defense, the other 11 members of the jury are convinced of his guilt, putting Justin in an unenviable position. He either goes along with a conviction or attempts to sway the jury by introducing reasonable doubt without drawing attention to an alternate scenario that might direct suspicion toward him. The film, in that respect, plays like a knowing subversion of 12 Angry Men, specifically Henry Fonda’s Juror 8. The Fonda character was guided by his uncertainty and the willingness to consider an unpopular outcome against the baying of the mob, whereas Hoult possesses absolute certainty but lacks the resolve to affirmatively state what he knows and accept the consequences. Justin is consumed by his guilt and a clear sense of right and wrong, but he wants to have his cake and eat it, too: why can’t an innocent man go free without the guilty (however unwitting they may have been) also being condemned?
For much of the film Justin serves as both its hero as well as its antagonist. He makes impassioned arguments for Sythe’s character and raises the possibility that the dead woman merely slipped and fell in the rain; however, when a fellow juror and retired police detective (J.K. Simmons) sees promise in a potential hit-and-run angle and begins conducting an off-hours investigation, Justin finds himself in the role of saboteur. The character is trying to walk between the raindrops without getting wet, and it’s amusing to note how Eastwood attempted something similar to this with one of his little-loved films from the mid-’90s, Absolute Power. In that film, the only witness to the murder of a young woman engaged in a tryst with an oily, Clinton-esque President of the United States (taps the politics sign again) is the cat burglar robbing the house where it happened; there, as here, if he comes clean, it means incriminating himself. The Eastwood of 27 years ago valued the guile of a crafty old fox, evading repeated snares and leveling the scales of justice without the personal accountability, but there’s no such fantasy this time around.
As such, Juror #2 tends to play better as it turns over in your head afterward rather than while watching it. The film, which has the anonymous look and shape of an airport paperback novel adaptation — stylistically, the most notable thing about the film is the uncharacteristic (for this filmmaker) use of cross-cutting in the courtroom scenes to compress the prosecution and the defense’s cases into a literal he said-she said — is less concerned with pulling rabbits out of a hat and more with forcing the viewer to consider how they might behave under the same circumstances and whether being a “good guy” is the same thing as being a good person. Hoult’s characterization of Justin is sympathetic but far from valorous; he knows what he “should” do, but that’s of academic concern when it stands in the way of being there for his wife and newborn daughter. One’s enjoyment of the film, then, is predicated on watching a “decent” family man twist in the wind, trying to decide whether to trade places with a one-time brute who isn’t guilty of the crime he’s on trial for. The film plays like a series of rapidly closing pathways, with Justin hoping to arrive at an outcome where everyone wins when none can exist. Each action he takes, every juror that he rallies to his cause, only further sets in motion a chain of events that draws the film closer to one of two unhappy outcomes.
There’s a clear moral clarity to the film, although perhaps a lack of finesse to the filmmaking. Colette’s prosecutor, a political animal hoping to ride a high-profile conviction to an election win in the upcoming distinct attorney race, has been cut from the same unflattering cloth as Olivia Wilde’s reporter from Richard Jewel; the sort of relentless careerist who won’t look up from her phone even when being confronted about the sloppiness of her work. Similarly, the two loudest and most obstinate jurors, refusing to even consider a scenario other than the one presented by the prosecution, are its only two Black members. Eastwood is no fool and understands the fidgetiness these decisions will inspire, and it would be unfair to say that the film doesn’t upend some of these early characterizations as it progresses. It’s just as true, however, that Eastwood has never been especially concerned with optics, and his films, particularly his “late style” ones, have often been marked by a narrative economy that can play as tone-deafness or indifference. That’s certainly the case with Juror #2, which finds the old master pushing on a provocative new door, one that leads to the individual falling short and requiring the doggedness of the state to intervene, while still being susceptible to his usual pigheadedness. If this truly is the end, then Eastwood intends to go out on his own terms, for better or worse.
DIRECTOR: Clint Eastwood; CAST: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros; IN THEATERS: November 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
Comments are closed.