Three years between film projects feels like an eternity for Clint Eastwood. His prolific output both in front and behind the camera ran steady for sixty years up until 2021’s Cry Macho. At that point, Clint was in his 90s and, while that film was mediocrity personified, it felt like a solemn, sentimental farewell to one of the greatest stars of his generation. Now, he’s 94 and he has yet another movie out. And yet again, it’s being rumored to be his last. Clint isn’t acting in Juror #2, a legal drama written by Jonathan Abrams, but it does possess all of the narrative economy and modest workmanship of an Eastwood film. As a director, he’s always been a volume shooter, and the quality has always been varied, but Juror #2 ranks amongst the very best films he’s ever made.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Justin Kemp, a magazine writer and recovering alcoholic. His wife, Ally (Zoey Deutsch), is in her third trimester of a high risk pregnancy – they suffered a miscarriage just one year ago. Despite their past grief, life does appear to be on an upward trajectory. The baby room is painted and the shower has come with plenty of gifts from family and friends. Ally is ready to drop at any minute, but Justin has to serve jury duty. The plan is to do all that he can to not get chosen so he can return and be on call whenever Ally’s water breaks. During the selection, he even asks if he can be dismissed because of Ally’s high-risk status. But he’s denied. Ultimately, he is selected to serve on a jury. The case is a murder trial that the DA, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), has staked her reputation on.
As Justin hears the opening statements, he starts to feel uneasy. The victim was a young woman found dead and bloody in a creek near a bridge. The defendant is her boyfriend, James (Gabriel Basso), a former drug dealer with a violent past. Their relationship was volatile. They’d had a fight in the nearby bar the night before she was found dead. The prosecution’s case is this: he followed her down the road in the rain, bludgeoned her to death, and threw her body over the bridge. The details bring Nicholas back to one year before. He was at the same bar that very night. Ally had just had her miscarriage. He bought a drink but fought the urge, driving home stone cold sober but riddled with grief, his eyes swollen with tears. In the heavy rain, he hit something. He can barely see, assumes it’s a deer and continues on.
What had settled in his mind as an anonymous scare now, one year later, feels much more ominous. Is he the culprit for this young woman’s horrible death? Does he turn himself in? The high-concept plot is rich with drama, and Eastwood gains a lot by leaning into an old-fashioned storytelling approach. Abrams’s script shifts along in moral gray areas, but Eastwood has always directed with moral clarity. The contrast works perfectly in this tale of conscience versus self-interest, exposing the ways in which the two are mutually vulnerable to one another. Justin is a Southern white man swayed by some vague form of Christianity. This moves him to want to protect James from conviction, but the suspense comes from how he can do so without criminalizing himself.
Eastwood’s film’s have always varied in their political astuteness, and there are moments in Juror #2 that become didactic in their message. It takes place right before the midterm elections in 2022, and I don’t think it’s too much of a coincidence that it’s being released within a week of the general election in 2024. Colette’s Faith has her own miniature arc that parallels Justin’s. Eric (Chris Messina) is the public defender that’s representing James. Eric’s relationship with Faith is far from antagonistic, but he sees her ambition from a mile away. He does his best to plant the seed of doubt, truly believing his client, which forces Faith to consider: is she convicting James because she thinks he’s genuinely the killer or because a conviction will help her in the upcoming election?
The film juggles all these themes surprisingly well, all while maintaining a lightness on its feet. This is not a foreboding moral tale but a spry courtroom drama with a twist. When the case is done, Justin joins his fellow jurors in the deliberation room, where he is the lone hold out on a ‘Guilty’ verdict. Any cinephile watching will immediately clock the allusion to Sidney Lumet’s classic film 12 Angry Men, and most will fear a drawn out pastiche, a new take on an old film. It’s not that Abrams’s script avoids that but it’s impressive the way he and Eastwood continuously subvert our expectations. The jurors are a varied mix (a wonderful ensemble which includes Cedric Yarbough, Adrienne C. Moore, Leslie Bibb, and a shockingly understated JK Simmons) that prove harder to manipulate than Justin expects.
As Ally gets closer and closer to delivery, Justin continues to try and thread the needle. He gets some advice from a lawyer friend (Kiefer Sutherland) whom he knows from AA. Even though he didn’t drink that night, and even though he never considered that he’d hit a person until a year later, no jury would give Justin the benefit of the doubt as a recovering alcoholic – he would get a serious jail sentence with little-to-no leniency. So a conviction is necessary, but some of the jurors refuse to budge from ‘guilty’. One of the smarter parts of Juror #2 is how bad Justin is at this, his sense of right and wrong constantly fighting against his scheme to protect his family. Hoult’s performance is a triumph of interiority, conflicts of interest splashing across his face as he tries to influence the jurors one by one.
There are plenty of logical holes throughout Abrams’s script. It almost feels like he’s sacrificing them for benefit of the drama, which makes sense with a film like this – a film that’s explicitly about a man’s moral turpitude and how it holds up against immense pressure. Eastwood’s handling of the themes and the performances is masterful, highlighting the story’s coincidences without ever devolving into genre trope. “What is true is not always right,” Justin claims at a certain point in the film, summarizing the central thesis in a way that would feel hackneyed if it weren’t so well executed. Many of Eastwood’s film’s have debated that statement, on either side, and it’s fascinating to see him at 94, still asking the same question, seemingly no closer to an answer.
Directed by Clint Eastwood