***/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland
written by Jonathan Abrams
directed by Clint Eastwood
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If it were the ’90s, this would star Richard Gere, but in 2024 it’s Nicolas Hoult as Justin Kemp, Juror #2 in a murder case involving the death of volatile Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) at the hands of her scumbag boyfriend, James (Gabriel Basso). Justin is a recovering alcoholic and soon-to-be dad, married to faithful schoolmarm Ally (Zoey Deutch), AA-sponsored by defense attorney Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and shocked to discover during the first day of the trial that he may have been the one who murdered Kendall one dark and stormy night, mistaking her for a deer he struck in the road and subsequently failed to find. If he goes to the judge (Amy Aquino), though, given his history in the cups, he’ll likely face life in prison; but if he doesn’t, an innocent man (innocent of this crime, at least) will be sentenced in his place. What’s a good but flawed man to do? Make a de facto widow of his beloved on the eve of their becoming parents because of an accident that could’ve happened to anyone stuck in an ethical Trolley Test cum The Book of Questions hypothetical? Or keep it to himself, knowing that the world is probably unmoved by the loss of low-aspiring/low-achieving James? It’s a fun parlour game, and Eastwood, 94, has fun playing it.
I don’t think a young man makes a film like Juror #2, packed as it is to the brim with old-man wisdom. With Asst. DA Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) by his side, the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), offers an after-hours toast to our legal system, which is, he says, obviously imperfect but “the best we got.” He says it like the death knell it is, as all of the documents in which we’ve invested our idealism have proven to be as thin and malleable as the ancient parchment they’re printed on. I think the sharp, ambitious Killebrew is dubbed “Faith” because she’s the one in whom we must invest if we are to have any: faith in the system; in humanity, perhaps; in civilization itself–trusting golfers to report their own strokes. Challenged with the possibility that James might be the victim of Byzantine circumstance, Eastwood frames her sitting alone on a park bench from an extreme high-angle behind a statue of the scales of justice. But it’s not justice that hangs in the balance, I don’t think. It’s faith. What we believe in is what’s at stake: what we will tolerate, what we think we deserve, and whether the law applies to everyone equally when there has been no evidence of this in what feels like several lifetimes at this point. We were made to memorize a pledge of allegiance that turned us dull and pliant. Liberty? No. Justice for all? Surely, you jest. Juror #2 ain’t subtle. Now is the time of monsters. There’s no time for subtlety.
Juror #2 was immediately tagged as old-fashioned because of its pacing and geniality though mostly, I think, because of its essential unlikelihood. After decades of legal dramas and true-crime docs/podcasts (something the film itself skewers with a “Juror #13”), the events of Juror #2 are so allegorically convenient that it feels quaint. There’s a 12 Angry Men-ness to how each of the jurors is so decisively slotted into types, a feeling of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington about it in the basic decency of its lawyers and judges. Yet this is more than the benighted child of Stanley Kramer and Frank Capra. There’s a glint of cynicism here, of weariness and despair, aimed at an ancient machine, the teeth of its gears ground to nubs from screaming the aluminum screams of metal against metal. Late in the film, when Faith has begun putting the pieces together, Justin tells her that if she reverses course and it’s revealed that all this hardship could have been avoided had she started doing her job earlier, it could ruin her career. Faith hears the wisdom of that and backs off in an act of self-preservation–but then it’s suggested that maybe she’s having second thoughts, and she shows up at Justin’s door, pulling him away from the nuclear Nativity of husband, wife, and baby as the screen fades to black. Has our faith in this smart, principled legal eagle been justified? Will Faith sacrifice herself to save one mostly bad man at the expense of one mostly good one? Eastwood offers two possible outcomes, neither particularly reassuring. Either we stand pat on the belief that an objective moral truth will eventually reveal itself, or we put our faith in fallible beings, lizard men in ice-cream suits who have made justice their careers and constructed identities for themselves as dowsing rods for elusive truths.
That there are no answers to the questions Juror #2 poses is entirely appropriate. If this is Eastwood’s swan song, he leaves the proscenium with the essential problem motivating his entire career behind the camera: this, all of this, is the best we got. There are no illusions in his films about fairness or balance, no social niceties left unpunished, no promises made in good faith left unbroken. Love is a privileged conceit based on illusion and nourished by tragedy; the things that divide us, like race, class, and gender, will always divide us like features on a landscape carved by millennia. Juror #2 says the best we can do is put our faith in the hands of an idea of grace–that there are enough people in the world who care that when things fall out of balance, we revert to a moral mean. Eastwood presents this from a position of not ingenuousness but rather hard-won sobriety. Pair this with Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, whose title was inspired by a passage from Middlemarch I hold tight to:
...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
We are at twilight now. Night is upon us. But then there’s dawn and with it, I hope, a great many knocks on a great many doors. I hope I’m alive to see it. I have faith that we all will be. I have faith.
