Nicholas Hoult said in an interview that when he heard that Clint Eastwood wanted him for the lead role in his new film, Juror No. 2, he read the script and called him enthusiastically. Eastwood replied: "If it's as good as you say, then I'll have to read it too." Ironic, irreverent and old enough to know that he doesn't want to waste any more time, he shot his last film, in the sense of most recent, going to substance of things.
The direction is measured and solid and the forty-second of a legendary career that continues to look forward. The context, judicial, is reduced to the essential: the court, the domestic interior of the protagonist, a few wise flashbacks that reconstruct some events.
Hoult is Justin Kemp, a good man in his thirties, married and expecting a child with Allie (Zoey Deutch), a teacher who years before had been his mentor in overcoming his addiction to alcohol. He is named to the jury of a murder trial but soon realizes that he could be personally implicated in the crime. When the accusation is formulated, he sees himself in a bar, the warm lights of the sign beaten by the incessant rain: sitting alone at a table in front of a glass that he turns in his hands, managing not to bring it to his lips, he witnesses the argument of an engaged couple. She will end up at the bottom of a cliff, he will sit in the dock in court.
The prosecutor is convinced that the accused is the murderer and the jury seems inclined to confirm it but it is Kemp who invites the other eleven to reconsider the evidence and to ascertain whether the accused can really be considered guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. The trial continues, but the system seems to be spinning in circles and justice, blind, oscillates like the scales in the hands of the blindfolded statue that represents it, hanging at the top of the Courthouse. Clint Eastwood, on the other hand, remains lucid, and in two dry and tense hours gives the hunt for the truth, with the camera used as a viewfinder, pointed at the person on stage.
His shots reach Nicholas Hoult and dig into a sense of guilt that does not subside. To confess or not to confess? Kemp/Hoult has a past as an alcoholic and knows that the penalty would be severe. But is it right that an innocent person should pay for a crime he did not commit?
Twenty-five years after Proven Guilty and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (set in the same Savannah, Georgia, as Juror #2), Clint Eastwood is back in questioning justice and on guilt, stigmatizing the fallacy of one and leveraging the other to solve the dilemma. The moral question has always been central to his work: where the system falters, Eastwood appeals to ethics and individual responsibility, necessary to maintain the social pact.
The impression is that, once again and forever, it urges characters and spectators to never stop to exercise doubt and to be on the right side of history. It is his style, his message and it will be his legacy. The film was co-produced by his Malpaso with Warner Bros, as it has been for the last fifty years. Good actors (almost) all, small but significant parts for Amy Aquino, Kiefer Sutherland and JK Simmons.
In the room
Original title: Juror #2, Production: USA 2024, Director: Clint Eastwood, Screenplay: Jonathan Abrams, Editing: David S. Fox and Joel Cox, Main cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Amy Aquino, Kiefer Sutherland, Gabriel Basso, Francesca Eastwood, JK Simmons.
