Crime and punishment
Ludicrous as storytelling, Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 is rich in themes and ideas
Nicholas Hoult is the tortured Everyman with a damning secret in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. Photos courtesy of Claire Folger/Warner Bros.
I’m not sure there’s another American director over the last decade or so I’ve felt as conflicted about as Clint Eastwood. I went from being an unqualified enthusiast to dissident in a fairly short period of time.
The breadth is truly staggering, with more than forty features as a director. The quality and range are rare and commendable. He’s made films I don’t like, or some cases even detest, but the versatility is undeniable. Movies like Bird or White Hunter, Black Heart changed my earlier resistance. As impressed as I was by Unforgiven, the way it consecrated his status as a serious artist opened up more problematic aspects to his art.
He showed a deft, intuitive ability to negotiate the commercial demands of the industry and make highly personal films. The increased tendency toward “culturally approved art,” or in Manny Farber’s legendary phrase, “White elephant art,” was perhaps inevitable. Around the time of Changeling, I just found the natural acuity and intelligence unmoored by increasingly questionable artistic choices.
I also felt the movies he continued to act increasingly defined by a narcissism that left me cold. I know he loves music, and he has a good ear and facility for it. Could he just spend the money, and hire a real composer? His idiosyncratic Libertarian politics never really bothered me until American Sniper, a nasty, spurious and reactionary movie that naturally became his most commercially potent work.
The Randian politics of Sully, The 15:17 to Paris or Richard Jewell are so self-defeating and annihilating, I found no personal point of entry to any of them. I always felt a complex emotional engagement with his best films. Now I just had an unnecessary and unresolved dialectical argument with them.
I also know enough to take the man and his art seriously, and never be surprised at what he is capable of. At the age of ninety-four, Eastwood has directed what could very well be his last film.
The courtroom thriller Juror #2 is overplotted and frequently ludicrous though sharp, penetrating and vivid as a psychological portrait of memory, guilt and ideas.
Written by Jonathan A. Abrams, there’s almost not a single part of the story that rings true. The entire movie is constructed out of false moments that fail basic levels of scrutiny. Entire sections of the film fall apart at just rudimentary inquiries. At certain moments, the ridiculousness is so pervasive Eastwood either ignores it or revels in it.
The contrarian Eastwood has always flourished with his particular brand of anti-realism. His best, most discerning critic, Dave Kehr, put it best when he wrote about Sudden Impact: “Eastwood’s movies don’t really work on a surface, social level at all; at their best, they operate in the realm of inner experience, emotional archetypes. They are mythic in the only meaningful modern sense.”
I don’t want to talk too much about the specifics of the story. At its best, the movie plays like a variation of a forties noir, like Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, a study of guilt and recrimination where a man slowly realizes his possible culpability in a terrible act.
Juror #2 is a private reckoning fusing the past and present. The eponymous protagonist Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a classic Eastwood construction, a damaged and unfulfilled Everyman whose life is haunted by failure and disappointment.
Eastwood is never afraid to bluntly amplify his ideas. A magazine writer, Justin is a recovering alcoholic still mourning the tragically premature end of his wife’s earlier pregnancy. Now Justin’s wife Allison (Zoey Deutch, an interesting actor wasted in a thankless and underwritten part) is about to give birth.
The writer seems slightly aggrieved and nonplussed about being empaneled on a jury for a high-profile murder trial in Savannah, Georgia. The prosecutor, Faith (Toni Collette), needs the conviction to juice up her political campaign for district attorney. Her drinking buddy Eric (Chris Messina), a defense lawyer, is a worthy and capable court adversary.
The defendant, James (Gabriel Basso), is standing trial for the alleged murder of his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, the daughter of the director). Their volatile, high strung relationship took a nasty detour during a night out drinking at a local roadside dive bar.
The confrontation spilled outside to the dark and pouring rain, where multiple witnesses saw and visually documented the young women leaving and the accused followed her. Her body was discovered the next morning in a ravine by a local hiker.
From the first of a series of flashbacks during the trial testimony, Justin is undone by a horrifying act of recognition. As the case is laid out, Justin must suddenly confront his own moral reckoning where his past decision-making returns with unsettling moral and legal complications. He is no longer simply tasked with analyzing the specifics, parsing the facts and rendering a verdict.
As a procedural and study of the law, Jury # 2 patently fails. It registers much more forcefully as a work of ideas and themes. The script and Eastwood sometimes work way too strenuously to tease out the symmetry, like the way a cell phone is used to introduce Justin to Faith, and link Justin to his consequential behavior.
Story is not Eastwood’s interest or strong point. He is very sharp and acute about character, emotion and feeling. As the jury deliberations take unexpected turns, the depth of character and their interactions and byplay achieve a more satisfying musical rhythm and flow. As a florist with a colorful past that would have disqualified him from serving, J.K. Simmons has a clever, cynical assuredness. Playing a medical student, Chikako Fukuyama also brings an unexpected charge and excitement.
In the past Eastwood was more agile and formally adventurous. His mise-en-scene felt more precise, fluid and open to surprise. The Quebecois cinematographer Yves Bélanger has certainly shot some interesting films, like John Crowley’s Brooklyn. Compositionally, his work here feels pretty flat, more workable and transparent than inspired. I kept waiting for interesting shadows and textures, or intricate camera movements.
For everything wrong or off about the movie, the interesting ideas cohere thematically. With Justin implicated by ambiguous, knotty circumstances, his own motivation, self-interest and pursuits rupture the Borzagian notion of transcendence and grace. Hoult, I thought, internalizes and captures that anguish with sureness and clarity. Questions about justice or fairness are presented though ultimately rendered irrelevant.
The studio, Warner Bros., now run by a wholly different corporate management with no emotional or business ties to Eastwood’s glory days, is barely releasing the movie. In Chicago, where I live, the movie is playing in a single theater; barely thirty theaters around the country are going to end up playing it.
I certainly hope this is not Eastwood’s last film. Juror # 2 is the work of a lively mind and intelligence grappling serious ideas. The movie never fails to hold the screen. The ending is a banger.
Great work on this one, Patrick!