Juror #2

I had heard good things about this film and watched it last night with a friend. It is a jury movie, except transposed in a way that 12 Angry Men has an additional complication. While in "12 Angry Men," it works as a closed room session which could be staged as a play production set, "Juror #2" needed to have the benefit of being a film.

The movie starts with Justin, a young guy with an expectant wife in her third trimester. The couple had experienced a miscarriage before this pregnancy and are still skittish about whether this time will go to term. Justin is summoned to Jury duty for a case in which a boyfriend and a girlfriend were arguing at a bar on a night with heavy rain. She walked off and was found in a ditch the following morning. The boyfriend is accused of being vindictive. But Justin in hearing the case is suddenly seized by a sinking feeling - he was at the bar that night.

It was the anniversary of the miscarriage and he was not wanting to bring that distress home. But he is also in AA recovery and is at risk of a relapse. On his way home from the bar, he hit something in the rain, but when he got out to check, it was too dark and rainy to see what it was.

And this is a high profile case, with the prosecutor wanting a conviction, as she is currently running for District Attorney and this would be a headline example.

So Justin is stuck by this unwelcome epiphany that he probably was the cause of this case, but is not sweating in the witness box facing a future of incarceration. Drama ensues.

This is a Clint Eastwood film, and so I was wondering how he wanted to resolve this story. He made his bones in western films, where there was justice and frontier justice. And you are following around this expectant father who finds himself responsible for an accident as a result of being in the wrong place at a bad time. Justin transgressed one of my mother's favorite parenting maxims of "Nothing good ever happens from being out late at night."

Does the film want to let our protagonist off the hook for his potential role? What is his responsibility to try to give this boyfriend a consideration of innocence? What about Justin's wife who would find herself effectively a single parent to an infant? What message or time does Clint want to leave with his audience as a guy who seems to want his films to carry hard truths?

 

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