A man is picked for jury duty. He seems like a solid enough fellow, maybe a little melancholy, and more handsome than most, because he’s played by Nicholas Hoult, whose eyes are an almost impossibly bright shade of blue. He shows up the first day of the trial and a look of panic plays out across his face. It seems he might have done something in his past that could have direct bearing on whether or not the defendant is found guilty. If he comes forward, he might end up behind bars himself.
It’s a scenario straight out of a legal thriller, and Juror #2 is a pretty good one. It’s also very characteristic of its director, the somehow 94-year-old Clint Eastwood: taut, lean, and efficient, with no compulsion to take two minutes conveying something that can be taken care of in 30 seconds. Eastwood will go down as one of the most economical filmmakers to walk Hollywood, or, in this case, Chatham County, Georgia, where Juror #2 takes place. (Smart move, by the way: Generous tax incentives make Georgia one of the least expensive places to shoot a movie, so you might as well make one that’s actually set there.)
Hoult plays Justin Kemp, who thought he hit a deer one dark and stormy night a couple years back. But once his jury duty commences, he realizes that deer might have actually been a young woman, whose boyfriend (Gabriel Basso) now stands accused of her murder. The couple had argued at a bar that night, the same bar where Justin, a recovering alcoholic, sat with a drink, deciding whether or not to down it. (He didn’t.) The woman ended up dead in a creek, near the spot where Justin heard that “thud.” Was Justin unknowingly responsible? And if so, what, if anything, should he do about it now?
Parts of Juror #2 play like a modern, twisty take on 12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s rapier-like 1957 drama in which jurors in a murder trial drag their personal experiences and prejudices into a heated deliberation as they determine a man’s fate. There’s a retired police detective (J.K. Simmons) who thinks something stinks and goes poking into the case on his own. There’s the guy (Cedric Yarbrough) who works tirelessly to keep kids away from gangs and swears he will never vote to acquit the defendant, who wears his former gang affiliation tattooed on his neck. Most importantly, there’s Justin, who’s in a hell of a legal and moral pickle. Stay quiet and he helps put a perhaps-innocent man behind bars. Step forward and he could end up there himself, leaving his pregnant wife (Zoey Deutch) in the lurch.
But the angry jurors are just part of the picture. The screenwriter, Jonathan A. Abrams, also fleshes out the defense attorney (Chris Messina) and, especially, the prosecutor (a wonderful Toni Colette), who is running for district attorney and hungry for a conviction — and also increasingly aware that something seems off here. The opposing lawyers drink and banter together when they’re not squaring off; there’s a professional collegiality to their relationship that rings true. There is no shortage of movies that argue for the general depravity of the legal profession. This is not one of them.
The recovery angle is also important here. As a recovering alcoholic, Justin has essentially taken a vow of rigorous honesty — yes, I know something about this — and pledged to live honorably. As a fellow recovering addict who appears to be Justin’s sponsor (played by Kiefer Sutherland) tells him, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” Then he also tells Justin that he’s probably up the creek if he tells the truth in this situation. Caught in a vise, Justin twists, turns and squirms. And we get to watch him.
Juror #2 is fueled by the improbability of its premise, which largely boils down to a couple of questions: What are the odds? And what would you do? Anyone who dings the movie for being unrealistic is missing the point. Juror #2 works by putting us in the middle of an impossible dilemma then asking us to hold on tight as it creeps toward resolution.