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

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. Manchester, England, population 568,000, gave it seven screens. Dublin, Ireland, population 592,000, gave it 14. But it opened on just 48 screens in the entire United States, home of Clint Eastwood as well as Warner Bros., the studio where Eastwood has worked almost exclusively for 50-plus years. As of Thursday this week — which is to say, Nov. 7, a week after it opened — "Juror #2" will be pulled from most theaters and sent in December to the streaming platform Max, which, like Warner Bros. is a division of Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the biggest media corporations on earth.

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 almost four years ago (still in the thick of the pandemic, it should be noted). The newly-installed CEO did a "new sheriff in town" tough-guy routine, stating that he was going to evaluate any and all existing relationships with talent no matter how revered, including Eastwood, whose movies have made Warner Bros. over $2 billion since the early '70s. "It's show business, not show friends," Zaslav said, quoting "Jerry Maguire," seemingly unaware that the line is spoken not by Tom Cruise's goodhearted hero, but an amoral and ignorant rival agent who is the film's only loathsome character.

It was also announced that, in a break from tradition, this would be the first Eastwood film not to report box office returns. This is 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 in the U.S. — which despite all the limitations placed upon it, it 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).

As you read this, WB Discovery seems to be quietly walking back its appalling decision to bury this movie and hoping nobody calls them out on it. It's being held over on some screens and expanding to a few others, and it now has a "For Your Consideration" page on the studio's awards promotion site, which wasn't the case a week ago. 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).

As for the movie itself: it's very much worth seeing, talking about, and defending against corporate forces that want to treat it as just another interchangeable piece of "content." 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 Eastwood's 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 sums up the film for me is the principle of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence." I'd add "or self-interest" to that as well. You'll know what I mean when you see the movie.

Nicholas Hoult stars as Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic and lifestyle reporter for a Georgia magazine. He gets selected for jury duty in the trial of James Sythe (Gabriele Basso), who is accused of killed his girlfriend Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) after an argument at a road house that caused her to leave on foot on a rainy night. Justin becomes convinced that Kendall might have been the "deer" that he struck when he was at that same roadhouse that very same night. (He got out of the car and inspected the damage but didn't see a deer, then drove home. Kendall's body was later found below the bridge.)

This is the coincidence I was talking about. I get that it's a bridge too far (sorry!) for the kinds of viewers that Alfred Hitchcock called The Plausibles.

But I don't think it's hard to accept that thing like this could occur in 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 try 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, something it would probably be impossible to prove years after Kendall's death). Justin's wife Ally (Zooey Deutsch) is deep into another problematic pregnancy after having already lost one potential offspring to miscarriage. Justin doesn't want to send an innocent man to prison. But 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 a child on her own, assuming this pregnancy makes it to the finish line.

But where things get really interesting is the long middle section, in which Justin makes like a dark version of Henry Fonda's impassioned liberal juror in the classic "12 Angry Men," trying to convince the rest of the jury that the prosecutor Faith Killibrew (Toni Collette), who's running for district attorney and needs a high profile conviction, has not proved the accused is guilty. 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 out 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 every interviewee is in a relationship with, unless she'd pulled a Mel Brooks and read the script. Plus, important cases are undone every day by failure to do rudimentary fact checking. Sometimes an investigative failure this basic causes a conviction to be reversed, a case retried, or damages paid out.

I also believe that Justin wouldn't have heard about this case despite being a journalist himself. Journalists specialize. If he's writing fluff for a local lifestyle magazine (which tend to be mainly advertorial) I can't see why he'd keep tabs on local trials if he wasn't already interested in true crime. 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, and one of the first things they teach police officers is that when you're under oath, you only answer the question put to you, and never volunteer additional information. I was sent home from jury selection several times after a lawyer asked what I did and I said I was a journalist. But one time I was chosen for a civil case without anyone asking me what I did. I thought it was odd but followed Harold's rule of answering the questions put to me. The case was settled after the first day of trial, so it ended up not mattering; I mention it only by way of reinforcing my point that "Juror #2" is filled with things that could and do happen, but that we rarely see in movies because they're real in a dumb, mundane way that embarrasses society.

These types of details in "Juror #2" are of a piece with the unremarkable essence of the story and characters, which is one of the most refreshing things about it. The killing -- if you think it was a killing, and remember that the script doesn't ever actually tell you it wasn't a killing -- is the kind that might not even get local news coverage unless it went to trial (as it does here). It's the kind of crime that's unimaginably horrific for the loved ones of the victim but unremarkable in the greater scheme.

The human behavior exhibited in the film rings true in the ugliest way. 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 outside of it, drinking at the same bar and bantering in and around the courthouse. This case is surely just one of many they're dealing with. Faith doesn't question whether this particular prosecution is justified because prosecutors get consumed by tunnel vision because they're expected to get a certain percentage of convictions to keep their job. Not only does she want to keep her job, she's trying to get elected to higher office. So she excludes or downplays any information that might cause her or the jury to doubt Sythe's culpability (not because she's an innately awful person, but because this is what prosecutors do).

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, because she was hit by some unknown and unrelated person, because she slipped and fell on a rainy night while walking on a dark road in high heels, or because she was lost as a result of some other, undramatized event. Finding out what happened to Kendall is not what the movie is about. The movie is about presenting a dozen or so characters who have other things on their minds besides doing the right thing in court, and fight any exterior pressure or interior impulse to do the right thing if they fear it might inconvenience them, or worse, require a life-altering sacrifice. Notice that, after Harold gets kicked off the jury, we never again see him investigating the case on his own. He gets a scene where he asks Faith if they ever seriously considered any other suspect, but aside from that, we can conclude that he put the case behind him and went back to his regular life. This is not a movie about a lone hero who will do whatever it takes to bring the truth to light. It's about people giving themselves permission not to care what the truth is.

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. If he were, he would've gone straight to the judge and admitted, "I can't serve on this jury because I am concerned that I was the one who killed Kendall." All of his manic improvisations (like dropping something and picking it up when a bartender from the roadhouse is asked to look around the courtroom to pick out the man who was in the room 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. And in a criminal justice system that's overworked, underfunded, and plagued by conflict of interest, cronyism, and everyday incompetence, it's not inconceivable that somebody 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 little Google search, she'd be humiliated and perhaps driven from office. She doesn't want that. 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 admit she made mistakes.

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.