Warner Bros.
If Juror #2 is indeed the final directorial effort from legendary filmmaker and star Clint Eastwood, it is hard to imagine a film that summarizes his style more clearly.
Juror #2 is a workmanlike piece of storytelling that prioritizes clarity in its photography, and creates suspense through moral intrigue.
It feels very much like some of the lesser known Hitchcock pictures of the 40’s and 50’s (particularly I Confess) in how it works hard to depict an ordinary man in danger of being crushed by vast, impersonal, social structures but still subject to the dictates of his inner conscience.
Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a journalist with an expecting wife Allison (Zoey Deutch) who is selected for jury duty on a high-profile murder case.
Local ne’er-do-well James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is accused of running down his long-time girlfriend Kendall (Francesca Eastwood) after a public blow up at the local watering hole. The local DA Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette, who is very strong here in a role that could have been one note), has bet her next election on a conviction, running on a platform of protecting women from domestic abuse.
The problem is that Kemp, a recovering alcoholic, was at the same bar that very same night and hit what he believed to be a deer on the way home. Wracked with guilt that he may have inadvertently killed the victim, Kemp confesses everything to his AA sponsor Larry Lasker (Kiefer Sutherland, who is reliably fantastic in a smaller role here) under the protection of lawyer-client privilege and Lasker flatly tells him that, given his history, no one will believe he was sober at the time of the accident and he’ll be charged with murder.
The tension begins to ratchet higher when one of the jurors, Harold (J.K. Simmons) reveals himself to be proficient in investigatory methods and begins closely examining the evidence outside of deliberation, threatening to expose Kemp and undermine the police procedure that seemingly produced the ironclad case against Sythe. Kemp has to balance his commitment to the truth against his responsibility to his family.
Juror #2 is well-paced, well-performed, and with the exception of a couple moments that strain credibility, logically written. Eastwood has never been a director who went in for dynamic editing or strong visual flair, if anything his toolbox seems to have gotten smaller as his career progressed, but the film is very legible. I actually feel like this story could have used more visual atmosphere and that the photography itself has a very “digital” look that almost resembles television. Still, it communicates a lot of information succinctly and trusts the audience to move along with it, and that’s refreshing in this day of tentpole films written for an international audience.
Where I think the film shines is in its casting: Colette, Simmons, and Sutherland are perfectly cast in smaller roles and Nicholas Hoult holds together the picture with a vulnerability that makes you feel the weight of his circumstances. You believe he’s fighting for his life, and Eastwood gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of simply filming his face as the court’s proceedings are underway and letting us read the conflict in his face.
This is ultimately a well constructed story, and that’s why it feels so quintessentially Eastwood.
It is perfectly paced where there’s always a major development at ten minute intervals and even the ending has a pleasant ambiguity about it. Eastwood has, outside of his mythic Westerns, always been interested as a filmmaker in smaller stories and about the relation between the individual in conflict with the state, and the human heart in conflict with itself.
Those concerns are navigated well here, and without any of the political subtext that derailed analysis of his recent films The Mule and Richard Jewell.
Juror #2 is a throwback to the kind of sober and thoughtful suspense drama that Hollywood reliably crafted through the 50’s and 60’s. It is not a stone cold classic by any means, but it entertains and that’s all Clint would care about at the end of the day.
Recommended.
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