Clint Eastwood‘s 42nd and possibly last film as director (hope not), Juror #2, also happens to be his best since American Sniper. At 94, this remarkable filmmaker not only still has it, he actually has it in spades over some half his age.
Delivering a classic courtroom drama — not a genre he has worked in much — Eastwood has made not just a riveting suspenseful thriller and family drama but also one with penetrating themes such as moral complexity and dealing with a crisis of conscience. It asks the question: What would you do in a similar circumstance but doesn’t answer that with easy solutions. It’s complicated, to say the least.
Eastwood, working with a fine original screenplay by Jonathan Abrams, has made one of the most compelling human dramas of his career, one that inevitably will resonate with smart adult audiences. You could hear a pin drop at Sunday’s world premiere as the closing-night gala of AFI Fest at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Justin Kemp, a regional magazine writer and dedicated family man married to Allison (Zoey Deutch), who is nearing the end of a problematic pregnancy and needs her husband close by when he is summoned to jury duty. He explains his situation to the judge, but she will have none of it, and turns out that he is selected for a murder trial involving Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), a woman who met a brutal death and ended up dead in a ditch off a dark road on a stormy night. She had gotten into a public fight in a roadside bar with her volatile boyfriend, James Sythe (Gabe Basso), who becomes the one and only suspect as prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) paints a picture of a guy who followed her down the road in his car and beat her to death. They even have an older male witness who fingers him as the man he saw in the storm getting back into his car and driving off.
But is it as easy as that? Certainly public defender Erik Resnick (Chris Messina) doesn’t think so and valiantly tries to suggest it was a hit and run and could have been anyone. As the lawyers bicker over the gruesome details, the camera begins focusing on the increasingly concerned face of Justin, who slowly realizes the uncomfortable possibility that he might unwittingly have been responsible. In flashbacks to the events of that night, we see him alone in the same bar with a drink in front of him, and then leaving and driving home in that bad weather, suddenly losing control and hitting something. He gets out of his car, now dented in front, and believes it might have been an animal since there is a deer-crossing warning sign right there, but he sees nothing and drives on. As he sits in the jury box, Justin starts to wonder: Was it he who was actually responsible for Kendall’s death?
Although he didn’t have that drink, it is revealed Justin is a recovering alcoholic who previously had been in legal trouble behind the wheel. Fearing the worst that an innocent man could go to prison for life for something he might have done, he goes for advice to his friend, Larry Lasker (Kiefer Sutherland), who leads his AA group and also is a lawyer and tells him no jury would believe him, especially with his background. He could get 30 years to life.
In the jury room Justin is, at first, the only one of 12 who argues that Sythe might not be guilty, but can he find a way out of this that saves James and himself while still being there for his wife and their baby who is due imminently?
There are so many twists in Abrams’ cleverly constructed scenario, and amazingly they all are plausible. If they weren’t, this whole soufflé could fall, and fall hard. It stays above water. Eastwood always honors the writer and rarely does radical surgery on his film’s screenplays. Here the script has been honed nicely, and Juror #2 also has been exceptionally well cast down to the smallest roles (Geoff Miclat is the casting director).
Hoult, who will also be seen this fall in two other major releases (The Order and Nosferatu), takes a difficult role that often relies on just his facial expressions but also is fully three-dimensional as this about-to-be young father has a severe crisis of moral conscience that threatens to upend his life, his marriage and his freedom. Collette as the assistant district attorney now running for the top job, is superb as a prosecutor who is certain she has her guy, only to have doubts she might have gotten it wrong. Sutherland has a brief but important role in terms of defining Justin’s moral dilemma, and Messina is excellent as a public defender who actually believes he has a client who didn’t do it despite surface signs that he did. The jury is perfectly cast and play well off one another, with veteran J.K. Simmons again proving to be a scene-stealer as a man who takes matters into his own hands and does his own investigation when the jury starts to divide.
Shot in and around Savannah, GA, where Eastwood made Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil a quarter-century ago, the film looks great and has a Mark Mancina score that nicely accentuates the story and has strong hints of the kinds of scores Eastwood himself has written for his movies.
Juror #2 , like Conclave, which opened this weekend, proves to be an exceptionally fine entertainment for adult audiences craving something compelling and engrossing — all too rare these days in bringing that discerning older audience back to theaters. Eastwood has delivered Warner Bros. another winner, but the studio doesn’t seem to realize its potential as they are only giving this film a “limited release” with what appears, so far at least, to be a minimal marketing effort for an Eastwood film with this kind of cast (reportedly it originally was only going to streaming — arrrrrgh). And that seems a shame. Audiences, the right audiences, given half a chance, would eat this up. Eastwood has made a film directors like Sidney Lumet (a master of the courtroom drama with 12 Angry Men and The Verdict) and Alfred Hitchcock probably would have loved. Sadly they don’t make ’em much like this anymore. You can thank Clint Eastwood for proving they still can. Juror# 2 is one of the best pictures of 2024.
Producers are Eastwood, Tim Moore, Jessica Meier, Adam Goodman and Matt Skiena.
Title: Juror#2
Festival: AFI Fest (Closing-night film)
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: November 1, 2024 – Limited
Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: Jonathan Abrams
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Chris Messina, Keifer Sutherland, J.K. Simmons, Leslie Bibb, Gabe Basso, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Adrienne C. Moore, Amy Aquino
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 53 mins