Juror #2

Twelve jurors repair to the deliberation room and take an initial vote on the defendant’s guilt or innocence. All of them seem to lean toward guilt, save for one, “Juror #2,” Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), his trepidation emphasized by the heroic figure he cuts, hands on hips, gazing out a window. It evokes the window motif of Sidney Lumet’s celebrated “12 Angry Men” (1957), though Kemp does not quite evoke Henry Fonda’s Juror #8, the one who insists on seeking the truth. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that Clint Eastwood’s 40th feature film is not about seeking the truth because it reveals the truth almost straight away. Instead, “Juror #2” becomes something more like a courtroom thriller as excruciating moral dilemma that deftly manages to bring itself to a conclusion without giving a definitive answer to the knotty questions it raises. And even if Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay is cloying enough to make the prosecuting attorney’s name Faith (Toni Collette), and even if it relies on a fair number of plot and character contrivances to keep it running, these are effortlessly papered over not just by the performances (I especially liked how grudging Collette makes her character’s turn away from careerism) but by the 94-year-old Eastwood’s patented just-the-facts filmmaking approach. Essentially, “Juror #2” takes the old E.M. Forster observation that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” and then ruthlessly dissects it bit by bit, rendering a portrait of a key American institution that ultimately is only as good and trustworthy as the complicated people within it.