The Verdict
By Gavin Smith
Juror #2
Dir. Clint Eastwood, U.S., Warner Bros.
Hitchcock would have given his right arm to get his hands on Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay for Juror #2—especially since it’s predicated on transference of guilt, the Master of Suspense’s sweet spot. But the transference of guilt principle here is outrageously literal in a premise that finds new ways to come at that most timeworn of genres, the courtroom drama.
Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a Georgia journalist, recovering alcoholic and father-to-be, is selected for jury duty in a trial of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend. As the prosecution outlines the facts in their opening statement, Justin realizes to his horror that the defendant is categorically innocent. Why? Because Justin now grasps that, after leaving the bar where the couple had a violent public argument and the woman stormed off into the night, he himself unknowingly caused her grisly death in a hit-and-run accident, under the impression that he had struck a deer.
Why doesn’t he speak up immediately? The moral problem is clear-cut, after all. But the film deftly pushes Justin into a corner. He immediately consults the lawyer who runs his AA meeting and is advised that due to previous DUI convictions, the authorities would conclude that he was driving under the influence and convict him of vehicular homicide, potentially resulting in a long prison sentence. So Justin’s excruciating moral problem is inextricably bound by his legal and personal jeopardy.
Juror #2 finds Eastwood considering anew questions of justice and doing the right thing. The film is effectively a retreat from the cynical fantasy of means-to-an-end law-and-order pragmatism promulgated by Dirty Harry and his ilk and de rigueur in genre films today. It calmly acknowledges and no longer knee-jerk denounces the imperfections of the legal system, in stark contrast to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, which cemented Eastwood’s right-wing Make My Day screen persona. Subsequent iterations of the Dirty Harry franchise and Eastwood films like The Gauntlet slightly backed away from the fascistic implications of its “Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot” credo, as articulated in Magnum Force.
Harry Callahan’s view about the legal system in that film—“until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I'll stick with it”—is unmistakably echoed in the congenial bar room banter early on in Juror #2 between no-nonsense, politically ambitious assistant district attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) and her courtroom opponent, public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina). It’s an open-and-shut case for the efficient, capable Killebrew, but Resnick is no incompetent hack, and is convinced of the innocence of his client. Eastwood takes particular care to humanize not just these two characters but also all the dramatis personae—including Justin, who is paralyzed by moral anguish over his dishonesty and culpability.
The case for and against is depicted speedily, with a minimum of drama. The nearest we get to an emotional moment comes during the testimony of the defendant, Sythe (Gabriel Basso), whose grief over his girlfriend’s death seems—indeed is—genuine. But Killebrew dismisses his emotional state as a performance. By intercutting and abbreviating the final statements of the prosecution and defense, Eastwood evades the genre’s reliance on rhetorical grandstanding—he isn’t interested in a by-the-numbers courtroom drama. The jury room deliberations that follow couldn’t be further from the impassioned speechifying of 12 Angry Men. In Lumet’s 1957 film, the guilt or innocence of the defendant remained unknown and irrelevant—it was the motivations and unexamined assumptions of the jurors that were put under screenwriter Reginald Rose’s microscope. Justin’s eleven-to-one holdout after an initial innocent-or-guilty vote is taken isn’t comparable to the morally principled stand of Henry Fonda’s character in 12 Angry Men—Justin knows Sythe is innocent but can’t prove it without condemning himself.
This jury is inevitably a 21st-century American melting pot in terms of race, age, and even, implicitly, sexual orientation, and Eastwood’s depiction of the push and pull of sentiments, reasoning, and argumentation as other jurors begin to see flaws in the case is penetrating and three-dimensional. It would be easy to wax lyrical about the uniformly great performances showcased in Juror #2 right down to the most minor roles, yet one must acknowledge Cedric Yarbrough’s Marcus, an aggrieved Black juror, who remains adamant to the end that Sythe is guilty, citing the defendant’s gang-affiliation neck tattoo, and who becomes Justin’s principal antagonist. JK Simmons is put to equal good use as the first juror to voice concrete skepticism of the investigation of the girl’s death; he is, significantly, a retired police detective. As Justin, Hoult, an actor who has never made much of an impression on me until now, gives a performance that fully registers his character’s conflicted state and inner turmoil.
Eastwood augments the otherwise straightforward, economic and unemphatic visual style he has honed for decades with a strikingly atmospheric lighting scheme in relation to Justin’s home and his increasingly tense relationship with his wife, Ally (Zoey Deutch): the reassuringly plain house gradually closes in until at the peak of Justin's moral crisis and his inability to convey any of this to Ally, the latter switches off the living room light, leaving him sitting in darkness, with only his face still visible. But otherwise, Eastwood keeps things simple and melodrama at bay. Juror #2 unfolds with rigorous logic and plausibility. A hung jury will simply lead to a retrial in which Sythe will surely face an equally unsympathetic jury. The likelihood of Justin being able to sway eleven jurors is remote. There’s no eleventh-hour revelation or deus ex machina to neatly resolve things. Eastwood has no illusions about the legal system, but at no point does he suggest that it’s rotten. In fact, the story he’s telling puts its faith in the personal integrity of public officials and the facing of inconvenient facts. In this respect Juror #2 speaks to our recent unpleasantness as the American social contract unravels before our eyes. The way the film’s shockingly abrupt final shot is cut short is simplicity at its most indelible.
Closing argument: Eastwood’s unprecedented 50-plus years as an A-list actor-director-producer is a thing of awe. (In your face, Pauline Kael.) His directorial productivity—40 films, i.e. almost a film a year—even exceeds Spielberg’s tally of 33. His economy and work ethic are legendary, and even aside from Sudden Impact (which has its admirers) and perhaps Pale Rider, there are few if any retreads in his body of work. Unlike, say, Kevin Costner, Eastwood doesn’t develop projects as vehicles to showcase his stoic, laconic screen presence—he has remained strictly behind the camera on 14 of his films. He's had his rough patches—the 1980s yielded none of his best work in my book, the closest being the overrated Tightrope (which he took over after firing its credited director, Richard Tuggle) and his passion project Bird. Quentin Tarantino insistently promotes the belief that the tail end of a director’s career is marked by inevitable decline in quality (hey QT, ever seen Ozu’s final films?). But in defiance of that dubious axiom, after a slowdown in the 1990s, Eastwood has surged back in the 21st century to direct some of his better and best: Blood Work, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, J. Edgar, American Sniper, Richard Jewell, The Mule, and sure, I’m not ashamed to admit it, Cry Macho. Add Juror #2 to the list of achievements. See this movie—even if Warner Bros. and David Zaslav would rather you didn’t. And about that…
Clint Eastwood’s lucrative and five-decade relationship with Warners encompasses Academy Award wins for Best Picture and Best Director not once but twice. American Sniper was the studio’s highest-grossing release of 2014-15 in the U.S. alone. Subsequent efforts Sully and The Mule grossed more than $100 million for Warners domestically. Eastwood’s prior film, Cry Macho, was a post-COVID flop. In his infinite wisdom, parvenu Warners CEO Zaslav questioned why Cry Macho had been made at all—particularly as the studio doubted it could turn a profit. “It’s not show friends, it’s show business,” he is reported to have said. And so Juror #2 has been released with minimal promotion on less than 50 screens, with Warner’s withholding any reporting on box-office results. Now that’s what I call gratitude.