Where Truth, Justice, and the American Bourgeois Collide: Clint Eastwood's "Juror #2"
Back in November, my X feed was filled with the hues and cries of professional critics, asking why Clint Eastwood’s latest movie, “Juror #2,” was being sent out in “limited release.”
That meant, to some, the metaphorical death of a major artist, Mr. Eastwood, a popularizing filmmaker still churning out stuff at the great age of 94. (I pause here to say: 94!!!)
Now as an observer of wide releases, of the movies sent out to thousands of movie theaters nationwide — i.e., my hometown theater *only* gets wide releases, and I’m a long-time student of what they get and don’t get — I knew that there was no chance that “Juror #2” could fit in with what could possibly make decent money as a wide release.
Watching this movie — now streaming on Max as of December 20 — I’m struck that “Juror #2” is a throwback movie made by an older person, for older people. And there’s nothing wrong with that!
It’s just that “Juror #2” is somewhere between a good “Law and Order” episode and a middling, no-thrills John-Grisham potboiler.
This, of course, would not fit in with the brightly-colored family fare or the teen-oriented horror movies that today make up about 80% of the wide releases.
“Juror' #2” really can’t be summarized without being reasonably spoiled, because the spoiler comes in the movie’s first twenty minutes. I shall try to give away as little as possible, while hinting at the spoilers.
Basically, a blue-eyed nice guy from Georgia, the humble bourgeois Justin Kemp, is summoned to jury duty. He looks the part of your average Justin, with a wife in a high-risk pregnancy during her third trimester.
Like most dutiful Americans, he wants out of jury duty, using his wife’s pregnancy as his excuse. No dice, says the judge. So he’s the juror #2 of the title.
But Justin should want out of jury duty, and maybe he needs a lawyer badly, because he knows *a lot* about the case on which he’s serving.
We’re shown that case during the court proceedings, in flashback, a nasty but boring crime case in which a drunk hick of a boyfriend is accused of killing his girlfriend one dark and stormy night after they have a row at a bar.
Justin, it turns out, has witnessed something about this crime. He was at the bar, even though he’s a recovering alcoholic. His wife was not aware of this at all. Uh oh!
The movie proceeds to be mildly to heavily didactic in every scene, as if the elderly Mr. Eastwood wants to teach his viewers about every aspect of their justice system.
“Juror #2” uses the classic “12 Angry Men” setup — Justin will be the only not-guilty vote in the jury room initially — but its scope is wider. For example, a prosecutor up for election must decide if she will pursue the truth of the case over and against polling that suggests she will be re-elected if the drunk hick is found guilty.
She does pursue the truth, against her own interests, and everyone in this movie is a dutiful do-gooder as well, except poor Mr. Kemp. He doesn’t divulge to the jury what he knows about the case, because it would get him in trouble, jeopardizing his recovery towards classic bourgeois American father-dom.
The movie’s entertainment-tension centers around whether all the do-gooders will do their homework and re-investigate the case, even when they aren’t allowed to by law, finding out who was really the killer and thereby harming the average-Justin main character. Or, whether the jury will wrongfully (as we viewers know) convict the accused hick of murder.
Eventually we get to the point where a character says, in a moment of moral ambiguity, that “sometimes the truth isn’t justice.” This statement is accompanied by two different shots of a statue of blind Lady Justice, weighing her scales.
Therefore it may well be that movie is trying to say many important things about American Justice, but I think its main mode is to teach about how the jury system works. Early on, Mr. Kemp is shown a training video for new jurors, which the movie skips over the main contents of. But it then proceeds to show the rest of the video through its attempt to entertain via its story.
That means we’re instructed in “Juror #2” as to the process of jury selection, the trial itself, the jury room and its various problems, and a number of basic questions you might ask your favorite search engine if you ever were selected to be on a jury.
Among those questions are: “can I visit the scene of a crime while serving on a jury?” and “can a former police detective really serve on a jury or not?” Also, “how do prosecutors and public defenders interact?” and “is justice really blind?”
Unfortunately the movie will not show you how to get out of jury duty. In fact, we’re told, as if the fictional judge is also speaking to all the viewers of this movie, that it’s our duty to serve on juries because we’re ideal for the role: impartial and unbiased observers.
Nowadays, however, we’re all well aware that nobody is unbiased in slightest. The movie feints at this, like “12 Angry Men,” showing that some of the jurors would vote “not guilty” because they want to go home quickly.
Yet the heart of its ethical dilemma is with Justin, who should tell the truth but cannot, thus getting to his position that “sometimes truth isn’t justice.”
While I won’t give the resolution away, I will say that Eastwood, at 94, isn’t as cynical as my X feed is about the prosecutorial search for the truth.
In that feed, conservatives get made at prosecutors supposedly installed by George Soros, and everybody else gets mad at prosecutors overzealous about stopping what they think are petty crimes, such as drug possession.
Once again, movies being dreams, “Juror #2” may by Eastwood’s elderly dream of Justice, ripped from Westerns of old and placed here in a modern social context.
My elders taught me to be honest, even when it does not benefit me, and with this didactic movie, I am hearing their voices loud and clear once again.