Juror #2: Eastwood’s courtroom thriller is a throwback to an era of straightforwardly grown-up studio entertainment
A juror on a murder trial comes to suspect himself as the killer in Clint Eastwood’s terse interrogation of the American justice system.
Back in the mid-Nineties, when Hollywood’s John Grisham adaptation mill was ravenously working through elder-statesman filmmakers like Coppola, Altman, Pollack and Pakula, the newly Oscar-crowned Clint Eastwood looked a good candidate for one. Instead, he saddled himself to a far zanier legal drama, the queer Southern Gothic curate’s egg Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1998), an ill-suited experiment that swiftly sank from memory. With Juror #2, the now 94-year-old Eastwood returns to both the courtroom and the Deep South – specifically, the city of Savannah, Georgia, where the previous film also took place – with rather more sober results.
On the face of it, Eastwood’s 40th film as director seems a throwback not just to the Grisham template but to a bygone era of straightforwardly grown-up studio entertainment. Squint a bit and you can see a younger Tom Cruise in the clean-cut features of Nicholas Hoult, playing magazine writer and father-to-be Justin Kemp – a decent everyman in over his head, as decent everymen in such films are wont to be. In the murder trial of a working-class roughneck accused of pushing his girlfriend over a bridge, lawyers deem Kemp a “perfect juror”: a polite way of declaring him upstandingly dull. What they don’t realise – and neither does Kemp, until the evidence unfolds in court – is that he’d be a better suspect than a juror: did he accidentally hit the victim with his car during a blinding rainstorm, sending her to her death?
It’s the kind of preposterous contrivance that would appear to cue a screw-tightening procedural thriller, yet Juror #2 winds up subtly subverting expectations. Narratively, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams show their full hand early, with little regard for suspense – a perverse move that pays off as the film reveals itself as a stern parable of morality and conscience, exhibiting a stony contempt for the vagaries of the American justice system. Only a couple of the twelve men – and women – on Kemp’s jury are angry: the rest range from dimly suggestible to selfishly impatient to actively corrupt.
Gradually, the film’s psychological weight shifts from Hoult’s suitably blank slate to a grasping public prosecutor played with chilly force and incrementally crumbling conviction by Toni Collette. As it does so, Juror #2 gains a minimalist, near-Bressonian intensity that belies the autopilot pacing and drab, yellow-filtered televisualism of its direction. It’s hardly the most vigorous filmmaking of his career, but it’s been a while since Eastwood – albeit in his typically brisk, terse fashion – had quite this much to say.
► Juror #2 is in UK cinemas now.