One Anxious Man

Nicholas Hoult is in the hot seat in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2.

Warning: this piece contains significant spoilers.

And so Clint was like, “Why'd you think of me?” And I go, “Well, I was thinking about who would look to 12 Angry Men as sort of a seminal movie for why they wanted to be a director. And I just figured that that was probably a movie that you really appreciate.” And he looked at me and he goes, “Meh.”

– Jonathan A. Abrams, screenwriter of Juror #2

Perhaps he should have sent the script to Aaron Sorkin. Like the 1954 teleplay it derives from, Sidney Lumet’s 1957 12 Angry Men is a liberal fantasy to the core: Henry Fonda as the calm, well-adjusted voice of sweet Socratic reason, unpacking the details of an apparent open-and-shut case and coaxing each of his fellow jurors into acknowledging the possibility things aren’t as they seem. Which, to be sure, remains only a possibility. But then, whether the unseen defendant is fictionally guilty or innocent is beside the point—which is rather to vindicate the system, or at least to imply we gain something from believing in it as far as we can.

All the evidence suggests the 94-year-old Clint Eastwood lost his faith a long time ago. Whatever Abrams had in mind before Eastwood got hold of the script, Juror #2 must be among the most grimly sceptical Hollywood legal dramas since Fritz Lang’s Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (released only a year before 12 Angry Men, but galaxies away in spirit). Lang would be the man to appreciate the ironies of the coincidence-heavy plot—as well as Eastwood’s teasing use of visual rhymes and riddles, starting from the opening credits when a traditional image of Lady Justice gives way to another image of a blindfolded woman, initially in tight close-up.