United States, 2024
Directed by Clint Eastwood
With Nicholas Hoult (Justin Kemp), Zoey Deutch (Allison Crewson), Toni Colette (Faith Killebrew), Chris Messina (Eric Resnick), Gabriel Basso (James Michael Sythe), J. K. Simmons (Harold), Cedric Yarbrough (Marcus)
A blindfolded woman is led by a smiling man down a corridor, invited to push open a door, and then gets her sight back to marvel at the room both are now standing, the place where the baby the woman is expecting is to live under the care of the devoted and proud father.
But the life of Justin Kemp, and as a consequence of his partner Allison Crewson, is to be shaped by another blindfolded woman, who is not a living person but a powerful symbol even harder to ignore and whose presence is signaled quite casually by a letter in the mail Justin Kemp shifted through quickly the same day as he let his wife find out how he decorated the baby’s bedroom and also threw a small party in honor of her pregnancy which is entering the final and decisive last weeks.
He is not interested to be a juror but cannot find a good reason to shirk the duty: justice is not a wife you can charm and entertain, it certainly cannot be led wherever you want to, it is rather you who are led firmly to another world filled of unpalatable facts hard to escape and portentous responsibilities.
Still, being a juror, the number two, at the trial of one-time gang thug James Michael Sythe in the court of the small Georgian town where he lives, tasked with deciding if the defendant did murder his girlfriend one rainy night after they quarreled violently in a bar before many witnesses, soon proves to be a far more onerous and terrifying experience than Justin Kemp would have ever thought about.
As state prosecutor Faith Killebrew, and public defender Eric Resnick, present the case’s details and their views, in a masterful editing sequence where words and accompanying images becomes the ball of a ping-pong game that swiftly sum up the drama, closeups on Justin Kemp track his growing malaise: he realizes he was at that bar that fateful night, distraught by the news his wife had a miscarriage, tempted to relapse in the corrosive alcoholic habits he had been striving to give up and then that the deer he thought his SUV had knocked down, the vehicle getting a bit damaged in the small accident, though he never saw clearly what occurred because of the deluge and had not been so sure, may not have been indeed a deer.
And Justin Kemp finds he is more in a bind that he fears: his lawyer explains to him what the events of that night mean on judicial terms and the conclusion is stark and grim. Coming forward with the truth would lead to charges and a conviction sending up in jail for thirty years, that is ruining his life as a young father, devoted husband, and successful journalist. So to hush up appears the lesser of two evils.
But that implies taking part in proceedings that could send an innocent to jail for decades two. So be it: the film becomes an exquisite riff on the seminal 1957 feature by director Sidney Lumet, “12 Angry Men”, showing how a wide majority of jurors stand ready to vote a guilty verdict only to get divided by a single but stubborn and smart dissenting voice. But the heroic juror of 1957 is in 2024 a confused juror with blood on his hands: motivation is not quite the same, worries have not the same quality, arguments sound different. However, the fight unfolds along the same battlefront, with the same context of a prosecution presenting what is arguably a really weak case (it is even worse in 2024 than in 1957): true, the jury is no longer an all-white and all-male group but it does not imply less bias and more care about a defendant and proceedings.
Once again one of the jurors, Marcus, stands as a forbidding hurdle to the logical triumph of the reasonable doubt principle, heavily prejudiced, on easy to relate emotional and personal grounds, against any guy who was part of criminal gangs. However, another juror seems ready to support Justin Kemp as the latter tries to convince the group, Harold, a florist that used to be a cop – an element that oddly escaped the diligence of the court during the selection of the jury. But it proves not so much a blessing as a curse as the clever fellow increasingly seems able to connect dots that could effectively dodge James Michael Sythe but hit Justin Kemp. A craven maneuver helps the juror number 2 to keep the worse at bay and forces the replacement of Harold by a nice and intelligent woman who soon has the same feelings as Harold, that is the defendant is not guilty. But unlike the 1957 film, the jury she belongs to would not deliver a happy ending.
This is not the real ending of the film whose narrative has grown at this point wider and more complex than the Justin Kemp’s dilemma. “Juror #2” has always been interested not just on the titular character and the jury, or the defendant, who in fact gets only a cursory look, but also on the state prosecutor and the public defender. If the case moved forward so smoothly and gets big media attention it is because Faith Killebrew is campaigning to get elected district attorney. A stern and resolute operator, she does believe in her case and stands firmly on her ground, annoying Eric Resnick who was a fellow student at the same law school and has remained an acquaintance. They spar all the time, fiercely in court, in a chummier way outside, and offer two faces of the same system. But the confrontation would go beyond stereotypical discourses on the American justice as a jury is frantically and bitterly debating. The mess sparked by Harold’s amateur work, which is nevertheless underpinned by far more rigor than what the local police and the prosecution have showed, forces Faith Killebrew to think again. And this time the consequences would be far more unsettling both for her and for that nice fellow who at the start of the film picked up and brought to her the mobile phone she dropped by accident, and then later proved constantly to her eyes to be a decent juror, even as he was manipulative and craven, that young guy with a nice face and a winsome smile named Justin Kemp.
It is uttered as Faith Killebrew and Eric Resnick once again spar, in a bar where the prosecutor has just given a campaign speech while the lawyer sips sullenly whiskey. He mocks one of her lines, blaming her for still believing in an idea a law professor liked to air, a respected scholar whose courses both attended in those bygone years, the lawyer still resenting how much the professor liked the bright young girl who has grown into the tough lady on his left at the counter. The phrase could have been forgotten but it cunningly gets a way of hanging up in the air over the narrative’s last section. It is in retrospect the key to the plot’s morale and its heartbreaking denouement.
And it is a very important and illuminating one, answering it providing the decisive clash bringing the film to a conclusion – though it is not rushed to it by the tranquil pace of the editing and the care to let folks getting busy with their lives. The beauty of that clash is that so much is just insinuated: neither speaker states obvious elements the audience has anyway in mind at this point. They do not want, and cannot in fact, move without a veil carefully cast on what one knows all too well and the other has now realized fully. But their opposing ideas sum up the plot’s drama and lays the groundwork for the final scene, even though the audience cannot be sure what would really happen to Justin Kemp, whose range of emotions and twisted actions are played masterfully by actor Nicholas Hoult. The fateful sentence puts an equal sign between truth and justice. But could truth really be synonymous with justice? And even if so, should they actually be, with all the consequences this implies? The answer in the case of Justin Kemp would be given when another door is opened, in the very last shot of “Juror #2”, in a supremely elegant bookending composition, and this time it does not open on a playful and comforting room. What has been, however, pleasant and reassuring all along has been to watch a 94-year old director displaying so much skills and wits, shooting in the most classical, calm, clever manner a courtroom drama which is from the start more twisted and tragic than could have been the case and eventually takes on a gravitas and a poignancy that cannot leave anyone unconcerned.