Another Fine New Eastwood Movie – See It While (If?) You Can

Back in 2008, a couple of days after Clint Eastwood’s Changeling had premiered in Cannes, I interviewed him about the film. During the small talk before we discussed the movie, I mentioned in passing that I’d been sitting just in front of him the day before at the Festival’s tribute to the great Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who was at that time in fine fettle despite being just a few months away from his 100th birthday. (De Oliveira would eventually pass away in 2015, aged 106, having completed four shorts in his final year.) Eastwood agreed that the tribute had been a memorable and moving occasion – it had included a screening of the short documentary Douro, faina fluvia, de Oliveira’s directorial debut from 77 years earlier – and joked, ‘I wonder what Manoel’s on… Whatever it is, I’d like some!’ Sixteen years later, having just seen Eastwood’s latest film, I can only conclude that Clint – himself now 94 – somehow managed to find out what was fuelling de Oliveira and obtained an ample supply.

Juror #2 is Eastwood’s fortieth feature as director and arguably his finest since that remarkable string of movies that began with Mystic River in 2003 and continued through Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima to the aforementioned Changeling. (With the sole exception of Hereafter, which to this atheist seemed uncharacteristically half-hearted, I’ve enjoyed all the films made since Changeling, but this new one, like American Sniper, Sully and Richard Jewell, displays the director on particularly impressive form.) It’s the kind of unflashy, serious, thoughtful film for intelligent grown-ups that is all too rare these days in terms of Hollywood ‘product’; there are no sensationalist gimmicks, no star turns, no rhetorical flourishes. This is classic storytelling: direct, lucid, purposeful.

I hate spoilers so will describe only the bare outlines of the plot. Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) would rather not serve as a juror on a homicide case, since his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) is expecting to give birth any day now. Still, he does his duty, only to discover that he has inside information on the case being tried which could set free a defendant whom everyone else readily considers guilty – inside information, moreover, which if made public would have dire consequences for Kemp and his family.

In short, Juror #2 is a variation on the classic courtroom drama; one could say that it’s rather like a mix of Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with occasional echoes of Rashomon. (The Kurosawa connection is fitting, given that Eastwood’s big breakthrough in film, after years as Rowdy Yates in TV’s Rawhide, was in Leone’s reworking of Yojimbo.) At the same time, the movie feels utterly Eastwoodian in so many ways. The script, by one Jonathan A Abrams, has its moments of contrivance, coincidence, even cliché (especially if you’ve seen the Lumet film, with its jurors keen to see their deliberation completed quickly), but it is also peppered with pleasing twists and insightful observations. Eastwood effortlessly manages to make everything move smoothly even as the narrative widens its perspective to make Toni Colette’s prosecuting attorney a character facing her own personal dilemmas. Indeed, the great strength of the film is its sensitivity to the storyline’s ethical complexities; no one portrayed is without their reasons, despite initial appearances to the contrary, and notions of good and bad, right and wrong, are repeatedly shown to be very far from simple or straightforward. At the same time, however, while respecting the experiences, needs and beliefs of all concerned, the movie quietly reminds us that factual truth and legal justice are paramount and not, in the end, relative.

While the film recognises the importance of ideals and institutions, it also focuses on the fallibility of ordinary human individuals, and on the effect that fallibility may have on society. It gently insists that there is such a thing as truth, and that justice is dependent on our respecting the truth. That, clearly, makes the film very relevant to the world we now live in. Eastwood has too often been pigeonholed as a conservative, even right-wing filmmaker; most of his films are fundamentally liberal and humanist. Certainly, there is a moral subtlety and complexity in this film that is very different from the simplistic homilies to be found in so much of today’s mainstream entertainment.

But then, as the ending of Juror #2 – an ending virtually unimaginable in an American studio movie – makes very clear, the film, for all its accessibility, is perhaps not so mainstream after all. Indeed, was Eastwood ever really mainstream? Looking back over his long, distinguished, still too often underrated career as a director, I’d argue that he wasn’t. So many of his films push against or simply ignore generic conventions, facile sentiments and hackneyed social assumptions; he has always been his own man. If Juror #2 does turn out to be his final film as director – and I for one hope it won’t be – then it’s entirely in keeping with movies as memorable, diverse, rewarding and unusual as (to name but a favourite few) The Outlaw Josey Wales, Bird, The Bridges of Madison County and Million Dollar Baby.

The sad thing, however, is that while the film is due to play in UK cinemas from Friday 1 November, it appears to be scheduled for very few screens; the Warners release plan is surprisingly modest. So if you’re an Eastwood fan, do try to catch it while you can.

Still from Juror #2 at top, courtesy Warner Bros.