In many ways, the American courtroom was seemingly tailor-made for the movies. Spiritually and architecturally freighted by spectres of innocence, guilt, and the presence or absence of justice and truth, the space can be easily repurposed as both a soundstage and a soapbox. The legal system it houses is made into a spectacle time and again by public consumption, and the people who mine this for material gain are performers — whether they admit it to themselves or not — in these supposed symbolic battles for the nation's soul.
Though cinema's compatibility with this hallowed site of process and penalty has amassed a surplus of pompous films that grandstand as much as their subjects, every once in a while a movie comes along to shock the genre back to life. Case in point: Clint Eastwood's Juror #2. Directed with an exactitude and force that no 94-year-old should reasonably possess, this gripping yarn cuts to the quick of the unforgiving system it dramatizes, probing those humanity-shaped holes that destroy the lives of so many American citizens without ever resorting to speechifying.
Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is four years sober, and his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) has made it to the final days of pregnancy after multiple miscarriages. Justin is called up for jury duty, and like most people who receive this summons, his attentions and responsibilities lie elsewhere. Though he pleads his case to a Savannah court's bullish Judge Hollub (Amy Aquino), she tells the group that their reluctance to be there is exactly what makes them ideal and "impartial" candidates.
The trial is for the murder of Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) one year earlier. The prosecution's only suspect is her boyfriend, reformed career criminal James Michael Scythe (Gabriel Basso). The details of the night of Kendall's death are revealed through conflicting accounts delivered by the competing lawyers, assistant district attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) on the one hand, public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) on the other.
Kendall and James were at the bar Rowdy's Hideaway that evening, and they caused quite a scene. He smashed a bottle, she stormed out, he followed. The couple argued some more before Kendall finally headed home, drunk and alone in the torrential downpour. Witnesses saw James head down the same road a little while later. Justin sits in the juror box, remembering. He was also at Rowdy's that night.
Having narrowly avoided a grief-stricken relapse, Justin headed home. A notification appeared on his phone, distracting him. He hit something with his car, but a scan of the area revealed only a deer crossing sign. He put two and two together and drove off. Kendall was found in a ditch just below the bridge, her body battered in such a way that an overworked coroner might assume was trauma from a blunt instrument.
Justin's horrified realization occurs a step behind ours, and the rest of the trial is just as strategic at delivering, obscuring and complicating information. Its use of Hitchcockian principles of knowledge and identification are reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's Trap earlier this year, but the pulpy grandeur and sardonic humour in that film stands in sharp contrast to Juror #2's pulse-pounding restraint. Even the interstitial sequences of Justin returning home to Abby are charged with all of the anxieties between a couple that lie below the surface — their dynamic (along with that of Faith and Eric, former classmates who meet nightly for drinks) goes a long way toward selling the film's vested interest in human messiness.
In the second half, in which Justin attempts to sway an 11 to 1 jury toward a verdict of "not guilty" á la 12 Angry Men, a retired cop (J.K. Simmons) begins an investigation of his own, and Faith — hungry for the win as her election to become district Aattorney nears — begins to doubt James's guilt, is where all of the film's explosive moral quandaries come to a ceaseless rolling boil.
Eastwood's unadorned yet dynamic frames carry the increasing pressure of a vise, and Jonathan Abrams's superb screenplay finds both cohesion and contradiction in the conflicting sympathies of its ensemble. The supposed impartiality — and ultimate reluctance — of members of the jury both aids and obstructs justice, and the film comes alive when it observes pettiness and frustration, taking on new meanings as it reveals more and more about the raw and real places those emotions often come from.
Clear-eyed and cynical — almost always from a place of understanding — Juror #2 is an anguished morality tale and engrossing psychological thriller that seamlessly folds the timely into the timeless. It's an absolute knockout from one of our oldest and most prolific chroniclers of American folly.