A Prophet is Without Honor in His Own Country; or, The Curious Case of Clint Eastwood | MZS

As you read this, 94-year-old filmmaker Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” is playing on 458 screens in France, where it opened at number one at the box office, according to reported figures. The movie is playing on just 50 screens in his home country, which also happens to be the home of its releasing company, Warner Bros., where Eastwood been working almost exclusively for over 50 years. As of Thursday this week — which is to say, Nov. 7, one week after it opened — it will be pulled from most theaters and sent in December to the streaming platform Max, which, like Warner Bros. is a division of media mega-corporation Warner Bros. Discovery.

The move has been widely interpreted as WBD CEO David Zaslav’s way of trying to out-alpha Eastwood, whose last movie, the box-office disappointment “Cry Macho,” came out two years ago (still in the thick of the pandemic, it should be noted) and prompted the then-newly installed CEO to brag that he was going to evaluate any and all existing relationships with talent, including Eastwood, whose movies have made them over $2 billion since the early ’70s. “It’s show business, not show friends,” Zaslav said, quoting “Jerry Maguire,” seemingly unconcerned that the line in the film is spoken not by Tom Cruise’s hero, but by an amoral and ignorant young Hollywood agent with no sense of how to invest in people and reap long-term rewards.

It was also announced that, in a break from tradition, this would be the first Eastwood film not to report box office returns, which seemed like a sneaky way not just to avoid embarrassment if it ended up a flop, but also to spare Zaslav if it turned out to be a success here — which despite all the limitations placed upon it, it definitely has.

The surprisingly near-unanimous positive reviews for “Juror #2” seem to have prompted spin control by WB: a story appeared this week in The Hollywood Reporter making it seem as if the insultingly puny release of Eastwood’s latest was part of a very responsible and clever master plan to save money on advertising and promotion and build up Max subscriptions. Never mind that Eastwood’s name has meant money with adult moviegoers of a certain vintage, often getting them into theaters when no one else’s movies could, and generating Oscar nominations and wins for “Bird,” “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Letter from Iwo Jima,” “Gran Torino,” “Sully” and “American Sniper” (which made half a billion dollars all by itself). And never mind that “Juror #2” is the kind of adult yet accessible courtroom thriller that used to rake in the bucks in the pre-IP-dominated era of theatrical releases, and that still could, were there anyone left in the business that knew how to build on an opening weekend success and “platform” a film — i.e. gradually ramp up the number of screens showing it, up to and during what’s known as “awards season” (September through January).

I’m enough of a cockeyed optimist to think that Clint’s gonna have the last laugh on this one. “Juror #2” isn’t just a good movie, it’s one of his best in years, and it’s good in a sneaky way. It doesn’t have the grim bombast of “Mystic River” or the scope of a “Sully” or “American Sniper” or “Letters from Iwo Jima” or the connection with Eastwood’s alternately critical and laudatory engagements with his own image as a movie hero (which is what made “Unforgiven” a commercial as well as critical hit).

In terms of focusing on people and things that could actually happen (save for its central coincidence, which drives the plot) it’s one of his more intimate (you could say “smaller”) movies, on the scale of something like “Changeling” or “Richard Jewell.” There are a lot of things one could take away from viewing it, but the one that lingered in my mind was the principle of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.” I’d probably add “or self-interest” to that. You’ll know what I mean when you see the movie.

Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic and lifestyle reporter for a Georgia magazine. He gets selected for jury duty in a murder trial and becomes convinced that the victim, who is presumed to have been killed by her hot-tempered ex-criminal boyfriend following an argument at a roadhouse, might actually have been the “deer” that he struck when he was at that same roadhouse that very same night. This is the coincidence I was talking about. I get that it’s a bridge too far for the kinds of viewers that Alfred Hitchcock called The Plausibles. But I don’t think it’s completely out of bounds to think that a thing like this could occur in real life when legal history is filled with equally weird stories, like the murders in Houston of two women both named Mary Morris, in the same part of town on the same night in 2000, both found dead in cars.)

Nor do I think it’s a stretch to think that somebody like Justin would start trying to wriggle out of the bind he’s in. As someone in recovery, he shouldn’t have been sitting in a booth at a nightclub staring at a drink (that he ultimately didn’t consume), and his wife Ally (Zooey Deutsch) is deep into another problematic pregnancy after having already lost one potential offspring to miscarriage. He doesn’t want to send an innocent man to prison, and he also doesn’t want to go there himself, not just for vehicular manslaughter but withholding evidence from court officials, violating his oath as a juror, and other crimes, and leave his wife to raise their child on her own, assuming this pregnancy is successful.

But where things get really interesting, for me anyway, is the long middle section of the movie. Justin tries to make like Henry Fonda’s impassioned liberal juror in the classic “12 Angry Men” and sway the rest of the jury to thinking that the prosecutor Faith Killibrew (Toni Collette), who’s running for district attorney and needs a high profile conviction, has not proved that the accused, James Sythe (Gabriele Basso), killed his girlfriend Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood). But of course Justin is really trying to push the other jurors into either a not guilty verdict or a mistrial, so that he can (1) can get home to be with his wife, who might go into labor at any moment, (2) not feel as if he helped convict an innocent man, and (3) avoid any potential ramifications of the crime that he himself may have committed.

Jonathan Abrams’ original screenplay has been criticized, even by people who like the movie, for having too many unbelievable elements, beyond the central coincidence of Justin and the accused being in the same bar on the night of the alleged crime. (SPOILERS FOLLOW, SO DUCK OUT NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE.) One is that the only other juror who doesn’t want to convict the accused, a florist named Harold (J.K. Simmons), is a retired homicide detective, a fact that would have disqualified Harold from jury duty had anyone on either side of the case known about it. (He eventually joins Justin in having serious doubts and begins conducting his own investigation in his free time, which violates the rules of jury service and gets him tossed out and replaced by an alternate juror.) Another contrivance, we’re told, is that Justin is allowed to stay on the case after Harold is kicked off the jury because he swears to the judge that he didn’t look at the paperwork Harold gave him in a courtroom hallway: documents listing all the people in their part of the state who have the same make and model of SUV that Justin drives. A third contrivance comes in at the end, when Faith has doubts after the conviction and completes Harold’s aborted investigation and ultimately ends up interviewing Ally, who recognizes her, figures ou why she’s there, and covers for her husband without mentioning his name.

Do I believe that a prosecutor turned district attorney wouldn’t think to run Ally’s name through a search engine and find out who she’s married to? I do, actually. She is shown visiting multiple homes during her post-conviction fact check, and I can’t see why she’d think to Google who each interviewee is in a relationship with, unless she’d pulled a Mel Brooks and read the screenplay. Plus, important cases are undone every day by failure to do basic fact checking. Sometimes an investigative failure this basic is what ends up causing a conviction to be vacated or struck down and the case retried and (sometimes) the state having to pay out damages to the person whose life was ruined.

I also believe that a florist’s past life as a homicide detective might have never come up during jury selection because, as Harold puts it, “they never asked me” about his life before he was a florist. I was sent home from jury selection several times after a lawyer asked me what I did and I said, “journalist.” But one time they chose me for a civil case without anybody asking me what I did, which I thought was odd. My point is, these things do happen. (The case was settled after the first day of trial.)

These types of details in “Juror #2” are of a piece with the unremarkable essence of the story and characters, which I think is one of the most refreshing things about the film. The killing — if you think it was a killing, and the script doesn’t ever actually tell you that — is the kind that might not even get local news coverage unless it went to trial (which it does). It’s horrible but not spectacular or unusual. Ten of the 12 jurors are inclined to vote guilty because they haven’t put much critical thought into the case and, more importantly, believe killers should be punished and want to get out of the jury room and back to their lives. Faith and her opponent, public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), claw at each other in court but are friends everywhere else, drinking at the same bar and having casual conversations in and around the courthouse. This awful case is probably just one of many they’re dealing with, no huge deal in the greater scheme. Faith doesn’t question whether this particular prosecution is just because prosecutors are expected to get a certain percentage of convictions to keep their job, and not only does she want to keep her job, she’s got trying to get elected to higher office. So she (perhaps unconsciously) excludes any scrap of information that might cause her to doubt herself and Sythe’s culpability.

In the end, the movie never actually tells you whether Kendall died because her boyfriend murdered her, because Justin accidentally killed her with his car, or if she was hit by some completely unrelated person, or slipped and fell on a rainy night while walking on a dark road in high heels, or if some other, undramatized thing happened to her. Finding out what happened is not the point of the movie. The movie is about presenting a dozen or so characters who all have other things on their minds besides doing the right thing, and fight any exterior pressure or interior impulse to do the right thing if the believe it might inconvenience them, or worse, require real sacrifice. Notice that, after Harold gets kicked off the jury, we never again see him investigating the case himself; he gets a scene where he asks Faith if they ever considered any other suspect, and aside from that, we can conclude that he put the case behind him and got back to his regular life. This is not a movie about a lone hero or heroes who will do whatever it takes to bring the truth to light.

And its main character is Justin, who seems more weak and craven, and hence more unsympathetic, as the movie goes along — but perhaps no more so than anyone else in the movie. He was never a do-gooder anyway — if he were, he would’ve gone straight to the judge and said, “I can’t serve on this jury because I am concerned that I was the one who killed Kendall” — and all of his manic improvisations (like dropping his AA sobriety coin and picking it up when a bartender from the roadhouse is asked to look around the room to pick out the man who was in there that night) are about evading punishment so he can figure out some “third way” out of the situation. He’s not a great man or even a particularly good man. He’s just a man. There are hundreds of millions of them in America and billions more all over the world. And in a criminal justice system that’s overworked, underfunded, and plagued by conflict of interest, cronyism, and garden variety incompetence, it’s not inconceivable that one of them could get away with what Justin gets away with.

The only person who does the right thing in this movie when confronted with a moral challenge is Faith, and she only does it belatedly, in the very last scene of the movie. She only goes to Justin and Ally’s house after seeming to shirk from confronting the obviously guilty Justin. He implies that, if the public ever found out that she could’ve nailed him if she’d only done one simple Google search, she’d be humiliated and perhaps driven from office. She doesn’t want that. It would be humiliating, and there’s a horrible little section in the end of the movie where we’re led to think that she might let a possibly innocent man stay in prison rather than be humiliated. This is what Eric means when he’s drinking with Faith she proposes a toast to the criminal justice system, and he adds, “the best we’ve got.” It’s not a compliment. It’s just a fact.