Presumed Guilty — Juror #2
I’ve always been a fan of Clint Eastwood, both as an actor and as a filmmaker. He’s given some of the most electric performances in cinema history, and has directed some all-timers in the likes of Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Changeling. However, as he’s gotten on in years (he’s still going at 94, God bless him), the quality of his output has undeniably waned. I’d argue he hasn’t put out a true winner since Gran Torino, and that was 16 years ago. Since then he’s turned out jingoistic nonsense like American Sniper, paranoid exercises in bigotry like The 15:17 to Paris, and painful demonstrations of bygone toxic masculinity like Cry Macho. Only Sully has scratched the surface of something meaningful, and that was largely thanks to Tom Hanks.
So imagine my gleeful hope of something resembling a sea change with Juror #2, his first project in three years, and given his age, might be his last. With an all-star cast and a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, surely this would mark a return to Eastwood’s greatness, and if it does end up being a swan song, it would be a fitting exeunt allowing him to go out on top, like Robert Redford with The Old Man and the Gun (though of course Redford has made small cameos since then).
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. This isn’t a terrible film by any means. It’s competently made, and the performances of Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette are stellar. There’s even one area where Clint reaches for that oh so satisfying exploration of our instincts conflicting with our so-called ideals. There is some genuinely good stuff here, but it’s overwhelmed by an absolutely awful script (penned by stage writer Jonathan Abrams in what appears to be his movie debut), which asks us to suspend disbelief about the very basics of our justice system while also demanding that we rebel against the core principle and assume that everyone involved is a bad person, and I just couldn’t get on board with it.
The story centers on Justin Kemp (Hoult), a magazine writer and, as we learn later, recovering alcoholic. His wife Ally (a completely wasted Zoey Deutch) is very pregnant, something the two have been working towards for a very long time. The other focal point is Faith Killebrew (Collette), a local prosecutor trying to score a big conviction in a domestic violence case to bolster her campaign for Attorney General, and she’s portrayed early on as caring more about political gain than actual justice (given Eastwood’s participation in our national discourse over the last decade-plus, I’m sure he thinks this is subtle). The case that causes their paths to cross concerns James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), who is accused of killing his girlfriend Kendall (Eastwood’s daughter Francesca) a year prior. Kemp, along with several others, are summoned for jury duty, and despite his plea about his wife being late into “a dangerous pregnancy,” the judge (Amy Aquino) does not dismiss him, and he is chosen for the panel.
This may seem like bad luck, but the selection scene is but the first instance of several that show Abrams having no idea what he’s talking about when he plays this trial out. While it’s not impossible that a judge might still demand that Kemp sit on the jury, most competent and compassionate judges would let him off the hook, because it’s far more convenient to find another juror right then and there than it is to potentially halt proceedings should he need to leave once his wife gives birth — or God forbid, has some kind of complications, which as is eventually revealed, has happened before.
More importantly, though, there are numerous other mistakes that even I as a layman know would never fly. One woman, Yolanda (Adrienne C. Moore), identifies herself as recognizing the defendant because he used to ride the bus she drives. The judge lets that go because it’s been a few years since they’ve seen one another. Uh, no. No matter how much time has passed, you don’t know what interactions they’ve had that may prejudice her against the defendant. She says she’s unbiased, but most people think that about themselves. That statement alone is unreliable, and if she carried any prior opinions about him into the jury room, it could taint the deliberations and be grounds for mistrial or appeal. In any normal courtroom, she’d be gone, too. Further, there’s a retired cop (J.K. Simmons) who goes unquestioned and another juror (Cedric Yarbrough) reveals that he recognized a gang tattoo on Sythe, which convinces him of irredeemable guilt, and of course he does not disclose that bias. The script, and Eastwood by slight extension, paint these flaws as errors on the part of Sythe’s public defender (Chris Messina), and not as grounds for immediate excusal for a full third of the eventual jury that’s impaneled. We’re but a few minutes in, and we’re already being asked to wave off severe judicial malpractice for the sake of expediency. There’s a reason why more people are summoned than are needed for a jury. It’s because the central tenet of the system asserts that all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. This judge seems to not care about any of that, even though reasonable doubt is already contaminating things from voir dire.
During the trial, which is itself a laughable affair full of circumstantial evidence at best, a case so flimsy that it should be used as campaign fodder for Killebrew’s opponent, we get our hammer drop. In the opening arguments, Kemp realizes he too knows about the defendant and the deceased, as he was at the bar on the night in question and briefly saw them have an argument. The prosecution alleges that after their fight, which carried on into the parking lot, the young woman began walking home in the rain, and Sythe followed her, eventually killing her and leaving her body in a ditch. Piecing things together from that night, Kemp remembers driving down that road, seeing Sythe going the opposite direction, and upon looking down at his phone when his wife texts him, accidentally hitting something. Not being able to see anything in the dark and rainy rural night (and being conveniently right next to a deer crossing sign), he assumes he clipped an animal that ran off under its own power. Now he fears he might have accidentally killed the girl himself.
This presents us with our key moral quandary. If he has indeed inadvertently committed vehicular manslaughter, what is he to do? It would mean that Sythe is innocent, and thus Kemp might take it upon himself to be the Henry Fonda of the jury room and try to sway the others towards an acquittal. However, as his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), who also happens to be a defense attorney, tells him, because he’s a recovering alcoholic with prior DUI convictions, no jury would believe he himself was not drunk that night (he went to the bar in a moment of tragic near-relapse, but did not consume the drink he ordered), and he’d go to jail for at least a decade right as his child is about to be born. So what’s the play? Does Kemp let an innocent man take the fall for him, or can he find a way out?
The problem with this proposition is two-fold. One, we don’t know if Kemp actually killed Kendall. It’s possible, but nothing can be proven. The one eyewitness near the scene was goaded by police into fingering Sythe despite clearly not being able to see anything, so if he recants and changes his testimony, there would have to be a lot more solid, irrefutable evidence to convict. Again, a competent judge instructs the jury that this new testimony alone is insufficient. Furthermore, the car had collision work done on it after the incident, so it’s highly unlikely that any forensic evidence would be on the vehicle. The only case a prosecutor could have is that Kemp was a deranged drunk driver, and again, with no proof that he drank and no blood test, that’s easily dismissed as conjecture.
The second is that the moment Kemp realizes his place, he’s got an out. All he has to do is interrupt and inform the judge that after hearing the facts of the case, he remembers that he was at the bar that night, and thus cannot be unbiased. The judge would have him testify, likely in private, to corroborate another witness’ testimony to show he was there, and then he’d be dismissed. His hands are clean, and an alternate juror takes his place. Lemon squeezy.
The reason we can’t have this simple solution is because, as I said earlier, the script operates under the assumption that everyone is guilty of something, evidenced by what it thinks is clever dialogue about how the system is imperfect, but it’s the best we’ve got. In Kemp’s case, it’s the weight of his conscience on a drastic “what if” scenario. For Killebrew, it’s allowing ambition to cloud her objectivity. For the rest of the jurors, it’s innate bias or sheer stupidity. The list goes on.
And again, to the film’s credit, Eastwood and the cast do their best with this shoddy material. The cinematography is really well done, particularly in the exterior scenes in and around Kendall’s death. Hoult plays out his internal and external anxieties about as perfectly as possible. Collette and Messina have an intriguing dynamic as former colleagues who remain friends despite being rivals with another man’s life at stake. You can see an earnest attempt to polish this turd.
Hell, in the one true bit of ethical nuance the film provides us, Sutherland’s Larry offers a real dilemma. Part of the process of Alcoholics Anonymous is giving yourself over to a higher power and making amends for your misdeeds. The 12 Steps include language like “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” and “Admit… the exact nature of our wrongs,” and yet here’s Larry, as Justin’s sponsor, essentially telling him to do the exact opposite, to do whatever it takes to cover his ass. Bury the truth, no matter who it hurts, and above all else, make sure the jury reaches a verdict, because a deadlock would lead to a mistrial, and we’re meant to assume that Killebrew would ignore her duty of candor (even she begins to doubt her own case) and press on with a retrial rather than take a loss before the election. I really wish we had spent more time on this, because THAT is the type of character exploration that Eastwood used to be the best in the world at putting to film.
It all comes back to this wholly misguided thesis that everyone is either corrupt or inept, and thus no one can be trusted to do the right thing, even while Abrams’ script patronizes the audience with insultingly elementary exposition about what constitutes things like confirmation bias and reasonable doubt. He thinks he’s making some kind of new age fusion of 12 Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, when all he’s doing is writing a bad episode of Judge Judy. In order for any of the nonsense in this film to go down, literally everyone involved has to be presented with a choice between ethical or factual right and wrong, and in every instance, actively choose the wrong option. It’s not impossible, but it is extremely unlikely. One or two missteps I can overlook, but this is beyond the pale. It’s like how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead opens with a coin flip landing on heads 92 times in a row, except that was a farce, and therefore ripe for absurdity, and this is meant to be a courtroom drama that people actually take seriously.
I’m reminded of the one time my mother fully served on a jury. It was about eight years ago, I believe. I remember because I went home for Christmas, so it’s been in the last decade, and obviously before she got dementia in 2020. Anyway, she had always wanted to be picked, as have I (she found the whole process fascinating, and I do as well), and the closest she got was to be an alternate once when I was very little. She got called in on a Tuesday at the local village court, so she assumed she’d be home in a couple of hours, and we’d go to a bar for dinner and trivia that night. She came back at noon for lunch, informing me that she’d been selected, but it was a small jury of six for a minor offense, so she’d certainly be done by sundown.
She returned nine hours later, exhausted. We easily missed Trivia Night, but the trial was concluded, so she could then discuss it. It was a simple DUI case where the defendant had gotten into a bar fight, gone to the hospital with a concussion (beer bottle broken over his head), and once he was released, drove himself home. Along the way, he was pulled over by a cop who had seen him at the hospital, assumed he was drunk, and decided to follow him and pounce the moment he swerved even a little bit. The defendant refused to take a field sobriety test — as was his right in exchange for surrendering his license on the spot until the case was resolved — and he was arrested. He pled not guilty, requested a jury trial, and offered no defense, because he knew the prosecution had no case.
Still, despite that, it took over six hours of deliberation to acquit him, thanks to one obstinate juror who decided he just had to be convicted and sent to jail, because he “knew what people like him are like,” and he “wouldn’t feel safe going to bed” if the man was still able to walk free. All six jurors believed he was drunk, but the prosecution didn’t prove it. The concussion could just as easily have caused him to have blurry vision and swerve as booze would have done. He had a right to refuse the sobriety test, and the judge explicitly told them that his refusal could not be used against him. Further, the judge’s instructions made clear that the testimony of the arresting officer could not be weighed as being any more significant than any other learned witness. Having a badge didn’t make him any more credible than anyone else. And yet, despite all that, five people, including my mom, had to browbeat this man for hours until he relented and simply followed the rules. There was no case, there was no need for a trial, the defendant walked free.
That’s what should have happened in this trial. Even without Kemp’s “holy crap” fears, there was no case here, there was no need for a trial (and a proper judge would have dismissed the case outright for a lack of evidence), and the defendant would walk free if not for the fact that 10 of the 12 people in this film’s jury room were as blind and ignorant as the old man my mom dealt with. That’s what I’m talking about when it comes to the lack of believability here. I can buy a few people believing he’s guilty. I’m even fine with everyone thinking he probably did it. But there’s no evidence, only character attacks and insinuations, and the way this “imperfect” system is supposed to work is that everyone comes together and simply says, “I think this guy’s a piece of shit, but the prosecution did not prove their case. Acquitted.” Instead we drag things out for two hours purely on speculation (and that includes Kemp’s situation), and we’re supposed to find that compelling. I’m sorry, but I just don’t.
I feel like I’m ranting, but it really is that egregious. Some looked to this film as Eastwood potentially ending his storied career on a solid high note. Instead, he, Hoult, Sutherland, Messina, and Collette simply work overtime to save what is an absolutely dismal screenplay to make the film merely passable. The best I can say is that much of Eastwood’s latter-day catalog is really well-made garbage with a terrible message, but at least this one isn’t his message. No matter how great an auteur you are, you can’t overcome a crap script. We could have had a fantastic tale of moral and legal ambiguity, and instead we were berated with platitudes from someone who wrongly thought he was smarter than the audience. So unlike the players in this shlock, I will rule Eastwood not guilty on this one, and hope that he’s got one more great one in him.
Grade: C+
Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Where does this rank among your favorite legal dramas? Is it weird to anyone else that Eastwood cast his own daughter only to kill her off? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on November 28, 2024.
