Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette are terrific in a must-see courtroom thriller directed by Clint Eastwood. Our review of Juror #2:
A good story needs a strong moral dilemma, and Juror #2 comes up with a satisfyingly grim one. Justin (Nicholas Hoult) is an ordinary young father-to-be asked to serve on the jury of a straightforward-sounding court case: after a very public quarrel in a bar one rainy night, a local man is accused of following his girlfriend to a remote Georgia road and murdering her. Secretly, however, Justin has a personal connection to the case – and sitting among the rest of the jury, he alone knows what actually happened on the night of the incident.
The latest – and possibly last – movie directed by Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 is a reminder of how understatedly good he is as a filmmaker. Economically yet with precision, he stages screenwriter Jonathan Abrams’ similarly well-written yet unshowy courtroom yarn, which effectively introduces Justin’s predicament before it zooms further out into a broader ensemble piece.
We meet Toni Collette’s Faith Killebrew, a prosecutor who’s convinced that rough-and-ready defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) was responsible for killing his girlfriend Kendall (Clint’s daughter Francesca Eastwood, seen in flashbacks) in a drunken rage. Her opposite number in court, defence attorney Eric (Chris Messina) is equally certain of his client’s innocence, and tries to convince the jury that the case isn’t quite as cut-and-dried as it first appears.
Through these hearings, Hoult’s asked to sit saucer-eyed as the arguments are laid out, the dread and guilt gnawing away at his character’s gut. It’s a terrific, even award-worthy performance from the actor, though it’s also arguable that there should also be a gong handed out for best casting director; everyone in the ensemble is impeccably chosen. JK Simmons – in a part that might once have been played by Eastwood himself – plays a florist with a more inquiring mind than his fellow jurors. Kiefer Sutherland plays an Alcoholics Anonymous counsellor and Justin’s confidante. Zoey Deutch is Justin’s heavily pregnant wife whose vulnerability makes Justin’s predicament all the more agonising.
With the panache of a particularly confident lawyer, Juror #2 pecks away at Justin’s past, revealing the darker nuances of a decent, seemingly all-American citizen. In the process, it points out the flaws in the American legal system – many of which spring from our own weaknesses as human beings. Witnesses and prosecutors all bring their own preconceptions and prejudices to the case. The jurors, none of whom particularly want to spend days on end in a stuffy courtroom meeting room, intend to get their deliberations over with as soon as possible (“I got three kids back home I need to get back to…”).
Like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, however, Justin (the titular second juror) is the only one who isn’t in a rush to condemn James to a life in prison. Of course, in one of the story’s several ironies, he’s doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Perhaps his guilt is such that part of him even wants to get caught.
Read more: Juror #2 | What’s the problem with Warner Bros and Clint Eastwood’s film?
As Justin effectively becomes the accused’s second defence lawyer (“He deserves a few hours of our time just to be sure,” he insists), Eastwood and Abrams effortlessly weave an intricate plot that satisfies as both a drama and thriller. The quiet deftness of their approach can immediately be seen in the lawyers’ closing remarks, in which their arguments about James’ guilt or innocence are cut together in such a way that it looks as though Collette and Messina’s characters are actually arguing with each other. Forty films into a career that stretches back to 1971, Eastwood has perfected a directorial style that feels almost effortless.
When he needs to, Eastwood simply sits back and lets his excellent cast do their thing – several of Hoult’s scenes with the film’s big-name actors are electric. At others, he steps in with a jolt of sound and editing to lock us into the nightmarishness of a given moment. Then he’ll go and contrast that tension with some charming, light character details – like the specific colour and punning company name on the van belonging to JK Simmons’ florist.
In the build-up to its release, Juror #2 has been overshadowed somewhat by Warner Bros’ off-hand treatment of it. Only given the most begrudging of cinema releases in the US, and barely screened for critics in the UK, Eastwood’s film doesn’t appear to have inspired much confidence in the studio which bankrolled it. For this writer, though, Juror #2 is one of Eastwood’s best-directed films since Unforgiven and A Perfect World in the 1990s.
If people don’t go and see it, then that really would be an injustice.
Juror #2 is in UK cinemas now.
