The System Has Failed Clint Eastwood

Juror No. 2. Photo: Claire Folger/Warner Bros.

Clint Eastwood always had one of the great faces of cinema, so it makes sense that somewhere along the way he became one of our great directors of faces. It feels ridiculous to talk of Eastwood’s “late style,” since the man has been on a late-style tear for the past 30-plus years. Unforgiven was the elegiac work of an aging icon looking back on a long and varied career; that was 1992. In recent years, though, as his films have become even more stripped down and settled into contemplative austerity, he’s seemed more content simply to let us look at the people he puts up onscreen.

The faces are important because that’s where real drama lies. In Juror No. 2, Eastwood, now 94, gives us a legal thriller that in its broad strokes could have come from an airport paperback. (As far as I can tell, it’s not based on anything, but an enterprising publisher could probably make a quick cool buck by novelizing Jonathan Abrams’s script.) While ideas of guilt and innocence have animated plenty of incident-packed stories over the years, here their value lies primarily in their emotional cost, in the way they tear people apart from the inside.

Chief among these people is Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a journalist and recovering alcoholic who’s just been chosen to serve on a Georgia jury that will hear the case of James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), an abusive lout being tried for murder. An ambitious assistant district attorney (Toni Collette) wants to convict Sythe for killing his girlfriend, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), by the side of a road one rainy night after a drunken squabble. As the case proceeds, Justin realizes that he was also at the bar that night, nursing an unsipped whisky and flirting with relapse. And on his way home, he hit something with his car that he initially thought was a deer but may well have been Kendall. It’s a great high-concept set-up: Can our hero, who is the real guilty party, save an innocent person’s life (and his own soul) by prevailing on his fellow jury members to acquit the man?

The troubled studio Warner Bros. has caught some deserved flak for its dismissive treatment of Juror No. 2. It’s given the film minimal marketing and is releasing it to a small handful of screens with no evident plans for expansion; bizarrely, it’s also not planning to report the film’s box office, which is either a preemptive admission of defeat, a thumbed nose at the media, or possibly both. Given that Eastwood has been for many years one of the company’s most treasured figures (once upon a time, it was rumored that he and Stanley Kubrick were the only two directors Warner deigned to give final cut), this seems particularly silly. But it also makes some sick kind of sense, given that Eastwood, for all his genre cred and iconic stature, is one of the few major filmmakers left making studio-financed adult dramas. To the modern studio executive, he must look like a glitch in the matrix — not an artist to be protected, but an error to be corrected.

Plus he’s working in a shopworn genre. Back when courtroom dramas ruled the land, they served as ideal canvases for reassuring suspense narratives. The legal thriller turned on someone gaming the system — corrupt politicians, murderous gangsters, sleazy lawyers, et al. — but the system usually prevailed. The powerful were the villains, and they could do a lot of damage, but these films evinced a quiet faith in American institutions. The truth would eventually come to light; justice would be served, even if it took a few extra tries and a couple of bodies. If we want to talk about why legal thrillers don’t quite hit the way they used to, we should look no further than our own growing cynicism about the effectiveness of such institutions, be that cynicism justified or merely fashionable. Juror No. 2 is the work of a man who hasn’t quite lost that faith; it features an entire scene in which the jurors are shown an instructional video, complete with American flags, about the justice system and the role they are playing in our democracy. But this is also a movie about how the system can fail even as everybody tries their best. It’s designed to deny us the satisfaction of seeing a villain get their comeuppance, simply because there is none.

This is not a film of rushing deadlines and dark investigations and narrow escapes and courtroom mayhem. It’s one of long close-ups, of internalized torments and doubts. As the slow agony of guilt chews its way through him, Justin’s world remains largely placid, if impatient. His wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth and wants him beside her during a high-risk pregnancy. The other jurors want to go back home to their families, and, besides, this Sythe character looks pretty guilty to them. The rival attorneys argue fiercely in court, but they’re also college chums who like to relax together with an after-work drink. Sythe’s lawyer (Chris Messina) is genuinely convinced his client is innocent, but we don’t sense that he’ll be too torn up if the guy gets sent away. Juror No. 2 suggests there is still purpose in institutions, but in some ways it’s the most damning of legal thrillers — one that suggests miscarriages of justice happen not from evil figures pulling strings behind the scenes, but from ordinary people making ordinary mistakes because life gets in the way. And yes, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that the man who was once Dirty Harry has now made a movie about the perils of rushing to judgment.

The generally admirable simplicity of Eastwood’s approach does lead to missteps. Several times, characters say they can tell Sythe is innocent just by looking into his eyes and listening to his testimony. That requires a more resonant performance than the functional one Basso delivers; perhaps “one-take Clint” should have given those moments a few more tries. But the director otherwise gets excellent work from his cast because he gives them both space and time. Eastwood’s unhurried gaze allows the characters’ humanity to shine through. His style might be simpler, but his generosity as a filmmaker, his willingness to embrace the complex and the open-ended, has never been more evident. Juror No. 2 is a fine entry in a great director’s career. It’s a shame most viewers won’t even know it exists.