JUROR #2 (Clint Eastwood 2024)

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NICHOLAS HOULT IN JUROR #2 [/i]

CLINT EASTWOOD: JUROR #2 (2024)

A juror who thinks he may be guilty of the crime on trial

This is a very good movie even though the screenplay takes liberties with plausibility. Never mind: it's intense, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and Clint directs it with his usual simplicity and integrity. There's something old fashioned about it, and in a good way. To begin with, it recalls Sidney Lumet's 1957 Twelve Angry Men, though with very different twists. It does focus a lot on jury deliberations where one man is trying to sway the rest. It quite lacks Lumet's wow of an (all white male) cast that included Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, and Henry Fonda. But Clint isn't striving for that kind of acting showcase, which would be out of place here. This instead has film noir qualities, with its seedy central action and its doomed, trapped protagonists and its reversals of fortune, that add to the fun, while there is a serious, fatalistic undertone.

The central figure, that Juror #2, is played by Nicholas Hoult, a rising English actor who lives in Hollywood. Hoult has had a big year, acting also in a Justin Kurzel crime action movie and Robert Eggers' Nosferatu. So much so that he did an interview-chat with Hugh Grant, whose cool horror movie Heretic is a current surprise hit. Hoult and Grant co-starred in the memorable About a Boy twenty-two years ago when Hoult was eleven. Hoult transitioned into more adult roles by starring in the splash 2007-2013 Brit youth series "Skins." His adult face may still not be familiar to many - not to many Americans, anyway. That can be an advantage for identifying with him and feeling like he's a real person, this young American with a wife in the late stages of a risky pregnancy, Justin Kemp. We watch Hoult's face. He has a youthful, sensitive look. But here, that face reflects a thread of changing emotions, reflecting torment and doubt throughout the film.

Kemp's wife's pregnancy doesn't get him excused by the tough lady judge (Amy Aquino) for this Georgia murder trial. When the trial starts, he turns out to be far deeper into it than he would ever have imagined. The deliberations are intense, more so for him than for anyone else. He doesn't return home early every day to see his wife because his attention has shifted to something literally life-threatening - for himself.

This is because Kemp thinks he may be the one guilty of the alleged crime. A young man, who has a rough background many think incriminating in itself, is on trial for brutally bashing his girlfriend near a road house cafe after a loud altercation witnessed by many and throwing her down a ravine. Kemp, a recovering alcoholic who was at the same roadhouse at the same time and was tempted to take a drink but did hot, hit something along the road he thought was a deer. It was a wet night and the road was slippery. Now he suspects what his car hit was the deceased girlfriend. He is faced with a terrible dilemma, whether to come forward or not. He believes the accused is innocent.

Many writers assume Kemp is responsible for the girl's death, and he does too. In fact we don't know this for certain. The important thing is Kemp's presumption of his own guilt. He is thus faced with a terrible prospect. After one of his meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, he arranges to consult on the matter with his AA sponsor, Larry Lasker (Kiefer Sutherland), who happens to be a lawyer. Larry tells him that with his record of past DUI's, no one would believe that he was sober that night after being at the roadhouse, and he would be convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to thirty years to life. He is a lifestyle writer with a young wife about to have their first child. Four years ago he turned his life around, getting sober. Coming forward would be throwing his life away, just when he has a life. But can he let another man's life be thrown away by voting guilty?

The story is sketched in economically (though the political stuff about prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) campaigning for DA might be deemed superfluous): the altercations between the young, pugnacious lovers; the jury selection, Justin Kemp's married life and the couple's tragic miscarriage in the year past, the summations by the prosecution and the defense. These summations are presented excerpted, alternately, which is a bit odd and seems to mark them as necessary but of minor relevance.

The lawyer for the prosecution is ably played by Collette. (The public defender is Chris Messina.) Her involvement in the campaign to be elected district attorney makes winning a conviction have a crucial importance for her. But there is a pivotal wedge in another juror, Harold Leslie Bibb (played with more restraint than usual by J.K. Simmons), a former homicide detective. Against the rules, Bibb starts investigating on his own in his spare time because he does not believe in the accused boyfriend's guilt. Kemp gets drawn into this, but when it's found out, he isn't implicated; Bibb gets ejected for this violation of the rules and Juror #13 is called in. This may lay the way for Kemp to assume his own guilt; at least it undermines the case against the accused.

In the meantime, Bibb's input and Kemp's support have begun to sway the jury from its initially almost unanimous "guilty" vote. The jurors keep voting, deliberations go on, and the voting outcomes keep shifting. An unusual step will be taken to help them in their deliberations. But suspense remains: how will this end?

Obviously I have already revealed almost everything, but how it all turns out I am not revealing so as not to spoil the movie for fresh viewers. Especially not a stunning final scene carefully debated and crafted by the filmmakers. These final details are twisty and enjoyable. But what counts is to perceive the applications to life in general, perhaps; the sense that our successes are delicate; that temptations are many; that we're lucky, but in an instant all may be lost; that things are not as they seem, that collective justice is flawed and people too often are convicted by circumstance.

Though Juror #2 entered the scene unobtrusively with little promotion from Warner Brothers, and its somewhat implausible premise has aroused serious reservations in some viewers and lowered its overall critical rating, it has also been plausibly heralded as one of the outstanding films of Clint Eastwood's "late" period as a director and even perhaps the best of them. It is both gripping entertainment and a harsh, thought-provoking examination of justice, institutions, and the legal system. Whatever its flaws, it emerges belatedly​ as one of 2024's American films most worth watching and remembering.

Juror #2, 114 mins., debuted at (AFI Film Festival Oct. 27, 2024 and was released Nov. 1. Unfortunately it has gotten meagre thatrical distribution. It can currently be watched on Apple TV. Metacritic rating: 71%.i

Allison Willmore of Vuilture includes JUROR #2 in her ten best of 2024 (at #6) with the following comment - it seems rather cynical and overstated, but that fits in well enough with the film noir aspect of the screenplay:

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6. Juror #2
It took a 93-year-old to direct the movie that best encapsulates our current crumbling sense of duty toward one another, and if Clint Eastwood’s courtroom drama ends up being his last as a filmmaker, it’s a hell of a way to go out. Juror #2 is a rhetorical high-wire act about a man trying to 12 Angry Men a jury into clearing his conscience without incriminating himself. But its real power comes from how divorced its characters all feel from the high-minded ideals of the institution they’ve been enlisted to serve. Jury members are impatient to settle on a verdict so they can go home, the prosecutor is using the case to cement her campaign for district attorney, and witnesses tell the police what they want to hear in order to feel useful. At the film’s heart is a bright-eyed Nicholas Hoult as a recovering alcoholic and soon-to-be dad who hews to his conviction that he’s a good person as though that were a quality that could exist separate from his own actions, up to and including the possible death he caused. Juror #2 doesn’t make him a villain so much as it makes him an example of the enormous uphill battle of doing the right thing in a world where everyone’s ability to get by is so precarious that self-interest starts to feel like the only reasonable choice.

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