It’s reassuring that, at 94, Clint Eastwood can still surprise us. After a long run of middling movies, he returns with his best since 2008’s Gran Torino. Sure, Juror #2 appears to be yet another polished, predictable courtroom drama; the kind we got a lot of during the ’90s. But thanks to Eastwood and first-time screenwriter Jonathan A Abrams, it’s a deeply involving and thought-provoking new spin on the genre, which serves up a ripe moral quandary that goes deeper than anything John Grisham ever managed.
The murder case around which the film revolves is deceptively small-scale: in Georgia, a thuggish guy (Gabriel Basso) is accused of beating his girlfriend (Eastwood’s daughter Francesca) to death and dumping her body in a roadside gulch. The only reason it’s big news is that the slick prosecutor (Toni Collette) is fighting an election to become District Attorney – much to the disappointment of her earnest friend and courtroom rival (Chris Messina). But that’s really the sideshow. The main attraction for us audience members is the fact that one of the jurors – nice, normal guy Justin Kemp (Collette’s About A Boy co-star Nicholas Hoult) – suddenly realises during the opening statements that he is responsible for the killing. The rainy night of the homicide, his car hit something which he assumed was a deer. Turns out, it was the victim.
So begins a fascinatingly fraught tension-ratcheter, which plays out like a morally inverted 12 Angry Men (here the Henry Fonda equivalent actually did the crime), with dashes of Rashomon as Eastwood cuts away from the courtroom to different characters’ perspectives.
It plays out like a morally inverted 12 Angry Men
On the one hand, Justin doesn’t want to send an innocent man to prison, so he resists his fellow jurors’ rush to convict. On the other, he doesn’t want to go to prison himself; it was a genuine accident, though nobody would believe him. The more he nudges the jury away from a guilty verdict, the closer he comes to revealing his own culpability. Especially when one of the other jurors (played by the ever-welcome JK Simmons) turns out to be a resourceful ex-cop convinced the prosecution’s botched the job.
Sometimes Eastwood’s handling of this interesting material gets a little heavy-handed, with some overcooked speeches about justice, but he never veers into histrionics or thriller-cliché antics. Hoult’s slow-burn embodiment of intensifying, knot-twisting guilt, along with Collette’s more sympathetic take on the traditionally hard-nosed prosecutor, keep things refreshingly engaging.
There’s no easy way out, either. The ending, while sudden, is both convincing and satisfying.
In cinemas worldwide Nov 1.