"Juror No. 2": review

Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp, Juror No. 2 (front, second from the left)

[WARNING: spoilers.]

A 2024 drama directed by Clint Eastwood (I didn't realize he was even active anymore) and starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, JK Simmons, Gabriel Basso, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Francesca Eastwood, and Kiefer Sutherland, "Juror No. 2" is partially a reflection of "12 Angry Men" and at least superficially a reflection—whether the creators knew it or not—of Tom Wolfe's excellent novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. The movie's premise is very interesting, and the important question is whether the movie realizes its premise's potential.

Justin Kemp (Hoult) is a blandly pleasant husband and journalist married to Allison Crewson (Deutch), an elementary school teacher; Allison is about to give birth; this pregnancy follows one that ended in a miscarriage, so Allison is very worried as the pregnancy moves into its final stages. Justin promises to be with her during her ordeal, but he receives a summons to jury duty for what turns out to be a probable homicide case. After getting through the voir-dire phase, Justin finds himself labeled Juror Number 2. He sits through a case about Kendall Carter (Eastwood, daughter of Clint), who was last seen arguing outside a bar on an extremely rainy night with tattooed ex-dealer boyfriend James Michael Sythe (Basso). As the circumstances of the case are described by public defender Eric Resnick (Messina) and prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Collette), Justin recalls that he was at the very same bar the previous year on October 25. As a former alcoholic, he shouldn't have been there, but he ordered a drink because of his stress about the miscarriage, then refused to drink. Through flashbacks, Justin recalls witnessing the spat between Sythe and Carter, who stormed into the rainy night, refusing to be driven by her boyfriend, with whom she seemed to have definitively broken up. Sythe tried to walk after her, but he lost her in the darkness. According to him, he took his car and drove after Carter, but he couldn't find her, so he turned around.

Justin, to his dawning horror, recalls heading down that same rainy road, getting distracted by a call from his wife, and hitting what he'd thought was a deer, but he stopped in the rain and found no carcass. As Justin sits in the courtroom, tense and silent, he begins to think that he may have been the one who'd hit Carter; she was found dead of severe blunt impact, including massive head trauma. Justin, more and more convinced that he might have been the one to kill Carter, goes to see his AA sponsor, defense attorney Larry Lasker (Sutherland). Lasker informs him that, with Justin's history as an alcoholic, courts would likely ignore mitigating circumstances and focus on the fact that he'd gone to a bar and ordered a drink. His claim not to have drunk the drink wouldn't be believed, and Justin would likely be sent to prison for thirty years to life. So the ethical dilemma for Justin comes down to this: be quiet and allow the prosecution to win the case (Killebrew is running for the office of district attorney and wants a feather in her cap), thus condemning Sythe, an unpleasant but innocent man, to prison; or confess to having killed Carter, be arrested, and abandon his pregnant wife right when she and her child needs him most.

Also part of the jury is a retired police detective (Simmons) who initially sees Sythe as guilty, but as time goes on, he becomes convinced that a different person committed a hit-and-run. Another juror is Marcus King (Yarbrough), who lost a brother to drugs and is convinced that Sythe, a former dealer, is guilty; King becomes increasingly suspicious of Justin's squirrelly behavior. Killebrew and Resnick, adversaries inside the courtroom but friends outside of it, often meet at a local watering hole and talk about the flawed nature of American justice as the case drags on; what had seemed like a slam-dunk guilty verdict begins to look more and more like a hung jury. Lasker, who is aware that Justin thinks he may have killed Carter, tells Justin that even a hung jury won't necessarily save Sythe from the machinery of justice. An unjust guilty verdict is probable. How Justin conducts himself is the movie's central focus.

I'm glad Eastwood made another movie after the poorly cast and acted "Cry Macho." If this turns out to be Eastwood's final film, it's a good one to go out on, a fulfillment of the plaintive plea I'd made in my review of that 2021 film: Please, Clint, before you leave us, make a decent movie we can all get behind. That said, part of me is actually unconvinced that Eastwood helmed this entire movie. The thing about famous old people who can die at any moment is that they're all usually shrouded in a veil of secrecy and disinformation. When Ted Kennedy was nearing the end of his brain cancer (glioblastoma, like my mom), reports came out that he was busy praying with his family and such, and I knew that that was physically impossible: when the tumors spread, multiply, and take over your brain, your cognitive function goes out the window. More accurate was a video clip of Kennedy in a car, looking stupidly slack-jawed and expressionless as he was being driven away from somewhere. I can see something similar happening with Eastwood, who's in his mid-90s now and surrounded by a coterie of family, friends, and PR people striving to protect his image. Is the man even still functioning? I have no idea... he's a stubborn, ornery bastard, so maybe he really is energetic and coherent enough to direct a film to its end. There are on-set photos of a bearded, smiling, coherent-looking Clint standing with star Nicholas Hoult. Whatever the case, "Juror No. 2" could be a nice capstone to a monumental career.

That said, the movie has flaws. First is the oft-recurring image of Lady Justice, the statue of a blindfolded young woman holding old-style scales and a sword. Shots of Lady Justice appear so often as to be cliché and very on-the-nose, as if the message of the importance of justice, and its intimate relationship with that other sacred concept, truth, were being beaten into us. The movie does do one clever thing about Justice's blindness, though: it plays with whether the symbol represents impartiality, as it's normally construed, or mere unawareness that ironically allows injustice to creep into the picture. And that injustice, in turn, makes one wonder how many cases of injustice are out there, undermining trust in an already dubious system that defender Resnick unenthusiastically describes as "the best we've got" despite its flaws. Another problem was a confusing moment near the end when the verdict is being read aloud: Justin isn't present. I didn't know it was possible to absent oneself from a verdict-reading, but apparently it is.

This is a major spoiler, but I ended up having very little sympathy for Justin, who struck me as something of a quivering moral coward, but I admit that I might act the way he eventually does if I knew that doing the right thing might cost me my family and most of my life. I suppose the cowardice could be consistent with his character as a recovering alcoholic: Justin admits that alcoholics can often be charming, which dovetails with their ability to lie and rationalize. Hoult plays Justin as a trapped animal who senses that the walls are closing in. JK Simmons, as retired homicide detective Harold Chicowski, senses something is up with the case, and with Justin, but he gets dismissed from the jury when it's discovered (through Justin's fumbling but cleverly devious maneuvering) that Chicowski had been quietly following up leads on the case—something the jury had been expressly told not to do. Chicowski, currently a flower seller, had also neglected to reveal his status as a retired homicide detective during the voir dire, which was another strike against him. Justin experiences a moment of relief when Chicowski is dismissed from the jury (Chicowski had been checking local body shops for body work done around or after late October of last year; after hitting the "deer," Justin had had work done on the old SUV), but juror Marcus King is still giving Justin the evil eye.

Something a lot of critics have failed to point out about this film (which had a very limited release) is that, even though Justin becomes convinced that he's the one who killed Kendall Carter, the film itself never confirms this, leaving it up in the air as to what the actual facts are. It might not matter, though: as time goes on and Justin becomes sure of his own guilt, he increasingly behaves like a guilty man trying to cover his tracks. What is the morality in a situation like that? Normally, we consider intent when we know for a fact that someone has killed someone else: did the killer intend to kill the victim? But what about intent when it's not clear whether someone has killed someone else? A Hindu principle of karma, in its moral sense, is that intention doesn't matter (unlike in Buddhism): if you randomly kick a rock off a cliff, and that rock hits and kills someone below, then you now have a karmic stain on you whether you intended to kill that person or no. So through that lens: if Justin didn't actually kill Kendall, even though he's increasingly convinced he did, does he acquire a karmic/moral stain for trying to cover up Kendall's death even though he might not be guilty?

The parallel with "12 Angry Men" became obvious right away: at first, eleven jurors vote "guilty" regarding Sythe, with only Justin as the holdout. Slowly, though, as Justin explores the issue, he manages to convince other jurors to vote "not guilty." Soon, only the most stubborn are clinging to the "guilty" verdict. The parallel with Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is also interesting: in that novel, up-and-coming Wall Streeter Sherman McCoy accidentally bumps into a black kid with his car while he's in a bad part of 80s-era New York City; the kid eventually dies, and McCoy, despite maneuvering to stay out of the clutches of the police, is eventually arrested. In "Juror No. 2," Justin seems to hit someone with his SUV, and much of the movie is about how the flawed machinery of justice appears to be closing in on him.

Despite its cinematic and literary DNA, "Juror No. 2" is still its own story, though, with an ending that I will leave unspoiled. All in all, the plot moved along at Eastwood's usual, plodding, unpretentious pace, and all the actors did fine work in their roles. Toni Collette as the driven prosecutor gunning for James Michael Sythe gives her usual deep performance. Zoey Deutch is solid as the stressed-out, pregnant wife who's terrified of another miscarriage. Kiefer Sutherland has the unenviable job of playing what is essentially a plot device, but he rises to the occasion without fanfare and puts in yeoman's work as defense attorney/AA sponsor Larry Lasker. JK Simmons does great work within his character's limited emotional range as retired, world-weary detective Chicowski. Gabriel Basso is plausible as James Michael Sythe, a man facing life in prison for a crime he didn't commit, but who nevertheless has plenty of anger-management problems that years in prison will probably not improve. Eastwood's daughter Francesca, as the ill-fated Kendall Carter, is spicy in flashback scenes, but otherwise, she spends a lot of time playing a corpse smashed on some rocks after falling off a bridge by a stream on a stormy night. Playing dead for film is an art unto itself, and a thankless one at that. Eastwood fille does a good job in the role. The cinematography, mostly of Georgia scenery and gray skies, emphasizes the grayness of applied morality; things are rarely clear-cut in the real world.

In all, "Juror No. 2" is thoughtful and tense. It shows its roots in other works, but it pulls you in and makes you invest in the characters on screen. While not a perfect work (with character names like Justin and Faith as on-the-nose ironic signifiers), it's a far cry from "Cry Macho," and I'm glad Clint Eastwood managed to crank this one out as a mulligan after his previous effort. I can't vouch for the film's legal accuracy, but for me, it's definitely worth a watch.