Nathan Weinbender reviews "Juror #2"

NATHAN WEINBENDER:

Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, his 40th film as a director, is an old-fashioned courtroom drama about the nature of guilt and the power of doubt. It’s a bit creaky, it’s occasionally heavy-handed, but it’s also satisfying in that earnest, meat-and-potatoes style that Eastwood has mastered over his long career.

It begins with a murder trial. On a stormy night a couple years ago, a woman and her boyfriend got into a fight in a backroad dive bar. She walked out, he followed her. The next morning, her body is found in a ravine, and the cause of death is blunt force trauma. The boyfriend, who has a history of violence, is charged with her death. He maintains his innocence.

One of the jurors listens to the details of the case and wonders why they’re so familiar. Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a nondescript guy, a journalist and an expectant father. But he can place himself at that bar around the same time, and he starts to convince himself that he, and not the man on trial, could have been responsible for the young woman’s death.

The film will follow him into deliberations, where he’s the sole holdout on an instant guilty verdict. The other 11 jurors want to finalize their deliberations and end it. But Justin plants a seed of doubt, and pretty soon it has consumed the rest of them. This is, in some ways, a remake of 12 Angry Men, but this time the Henry Fonda character has something weighing on his conscience.

Now, this is the sort of plot you could write off as ludicrous. This is a potboiler, to be sure, but Hoult’s performance makes us believe it. Because we’re not in Justin’s head, Hoult has to sell his emotional uncertainty with his face, his eyes, his body language. He has an easy escape route in agreeing with the consensus, but he doesn’t take it. Is it because he’s trying to be virtuous, or because he believes he won’t be caught?

We keep flashing back to the night of the murder, seeing it from slightly different angles and with subtle shifts in tone and behavior depending on who’s narrating. It makes us question our own knee-jerk responses to the crime. So, too, does the prosecutor played by Toni Collette, prophetically named Faith. Her victory in this particular case may be the deciding factor in her current campaign for state D.A., and she realizes her political ambitions have blinkered her common sense.

Eastwood is less concerned with legal thriller fireworks than he is the gradual revelation of his characters’ shifting morals, like a bloodstain slowly blossoming on white fabric. The ending is fascinating in the way it leaves us to sort out our own theories and feelings.

Eastwood, who’s 94, says Juror #2 will be his last movie, although he also said that several movies ago. If it is a swan song, it represents his career in microcosm. It’s dealing with themes that have long been part of his work: it’s a story about whether people can change—their morals, their habits, their attitudes about the world, their minds about a verdict—and about the complex machinations of a distinctly American institution. Is the movie about how the justice system is supposed to function, or about how easily the system can be corrupted? It’s more nuanced than you might think.

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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.