Two directors who can legitimately be described as “legendary” had new movies out this year that, given the ages of the respective men, could very well be their last movies. For Francis Ford Coppolla, that movie was Megalopolis, an ambitious movie that didn’t seem to work in any real way despite having something important to say. Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood made the legal thriller Juror No. 2. Originally intended as a straight-to-streaming movie, Juror No. 2 instead got a theatrical release, and since I am a big time Eastwood fan (at least as a director), I made sure to see it when it hit local theaters.
Granted, I graded Eastwood’s previous movie Cry Macho on a massive curve, but let me just say here that I won’t be doing that this time because I don’t think I am going to have to.
Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a happily-married man, worried mostly about his wife Ally’s (Zoey Deutch) high-risk pregnancy. He’s gotten a jury duty notice that he can’t ignore, and he actually finds himself on the jury for a murder trial. The case doesn’t mean much to him at first, but prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) is running for District Attorney and needs to win this case to win the election. As such, there’s a lot riding on the case for her, but then it turns out there’s a lot riding on this case for Justin too: he realizes after he’s been seated that he actually knows for a fact that the accused (Gabriel Basso) is innocent of all charges because Justin himself was a witness to the case.
It’s actually more complicated than that: Justin is a recovering alcoholic, sober for four years, and the fight between accused and the victim, a bickering couple, took place in a bar late at night during a bad thunderstorm. Justin did not have anything to drink, but he did hit something on the ride home. It was dark. He didn’t see what he hit. And there was nothing nearby when he got out of his car to look, though there was a deer crossing sign. Justin then realizes he is the actual killer, something done by accident, but as Justin lawyer/AA sponsor tells him, if Justin were to step forward and tell the truth, thanks to two prior DUIs, he would be getting thirty years in jail even if it was an accident and he was sober since he left a bar. The only thing to do is try to and get the accused acquitted, all without giving himself a way. Can Justin do that?
At first glance, it might seem as if Eastwood is trying to make his own version of 12 Angry Men. That’s not quite what’s going on, but it’s a close thing. Justin knows exactly what happened, but to step forward would be to ruin his own life and that of his new family. He doesn’t want to do that, but he also doesn’t want an innocent man to go to jail. The other jurors are an eclectic bunch, most notably one played by Cedric Yarbrough that refuses to think the accused could be innocent and JK Simmons as one that is a retired homicide detective from Chicago with his own feelings on the case. But then there’s Collette’s prosecutor, chided by her former classmate (Chris Messina), now the public defender working opposite her, trying to win the case while maybe wondering if she should have conducted a more thorough investigation. The movie is essentially wondering if two different characters can get past their own self-interests to do the right thing.
As a movie, that works well. There’s a moment in one scene where Hoult is looking at a full shot glass, wondering if he will take a drink and fall off the wagon, that filled me with real tension, and the movie doesn’t offer any easy answers. Justin doesn’t see himself as a bad guy, but he also doesn’t want to abandon his wife and the baby that is on its way. Faith isn’t evil so much as ambitious. I’ve read recently that Eastwood’s movies tend to have the message that whatever you are and whatever you have done is still you deep down, making change impossible. People are defined by what they have done, not what they want to think of themselves, and Hoult plays his character well as a confused man who has to decide if he’s going to do the right thing in the end, or if he can see himself as the person he really is and not the one he wants to be. That makes for good drama, and while Eastwood’s movie isn’t going to be listed among his best, it is a solid entry in his filmography worth a look.
Grade: B+
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