Clint Eastwood’s “Juror # 2” has the feel of a procedural that is destined to run on TBS dozens of times a year and command the rapt attention of your grandfather. It is talky and earnest. It has a plot and moves at that stately pace that is the essence of Eastwoodian. These qualities are special now given the general incoherent pointlessness that grips mainstream American cinema. But “Juror # 2” is more than a master’s conjuring of a prior way of doing things. It is tricky and dark and you may realize at a certain point that Eastwood has led you into an uncomfortable abyss.
The 94-year-old Eastwood doesn’t appear to break a sweat setting up the particulars of Jonathan A. Abrams’ script, which inventively cross-pollinates Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men” with Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” and even Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Where a younger director might hammer points home, Eastwood lets details and symbols quietly accumulate. The film opens on a woman blindfolded, being led into a bedroom newly remodeled for a future child. That woman, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is very pregnant, and her husband, Justin (Nicholas Hoult), is eager to show her his handiwork. The blindfolding shtick seems to be a bit much until it strikes you that it’s a pun on justice being blind.
A statue of Lady Justice stands outside of the Georgia court that is to be Justin’s place of business for a long stretch. He has jury duty, which he fails to escape, and it’s a murder case. James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is accused of beating his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood), to death and leaving her at the bottom of a ravine not far from a bar where they were last seen drinking and fighting, which was routine for them. The prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), sees this as open and shut. Faith is running for district attorney and reporters remind her that a victory here could swing her favorability by five points.
This plot should be critiquing itself, so far. A potential killer named “Sythe.” A warrior for justice named Faith — the movie isn’t pretending it’s subtle. Best of all is the idea of an attorney’s record mattering in an election. Maybe actions still affect local elections, but the tribal nihilism of national contests has obliterated any, um, faith I have in the matter. I promise that I am not going to turn this review into a subliminal referendum on the recent presidential election. We critics did that in 2016, and those reviews, mine included, are embarrassing. I’ll leave it at this: To watch a movie in which actions are taken seriously, against the backdrop of a corrupt man’s re-election and the ongoing onslaught of eyesore sequels to remakes of reboots, is in itself poignant.
The curveball: As Justin hears the particulars of the case, he realizes that he was at the bar the same night as James and Kendall. He ordered a bourbon and stared at it with longing and terror because he is a recovering alcoholic who was standing at the precipice of relapse. Justin beats temptation and leaves the drink on the table and drives home in the rain by the very cliff that Kendall tumbled down, one way or another, to her death. And he hit a deer and had to get body work done on the car. Or was the deer, Kendall?
This is an ingenious set-up for a page-turner or the kind of prestige courtroom thriller that we used to take for granted in the 1980s and 1990s. And yet “Juror # 2” hits harder than most of those old movies do. The plot turns here are satisfying but the movie isn’t only about those fleeting pleasures. The film elegantly rhymes Justin’s guilt over his potential relapse with the decline in America’s faith in its institutions. Remarkably, the question of whether Justin killed Kendall or not is nearly treated by Eastwood as immaterial. It’s the fact that he could be, and Justin could be because he almost revoked the contract of his sobriety, which is taken seriously here as a social contract, a micro embodiment of the much larger social construct of the American justice system.
As a recovering alcoholic, “Juror # 2” hit me like a truck. Alcoholism isn’t just a plot device here. Eastwood and Abrams and Hoult burrow into the guilt, conjuring the shroud that hangs over addicts even after they’ve straightened themselves out. That shroud is composed in part of possibility: if we managed to get out of our cycle of addiction and selfishness and manipulation largely unscathed, why? We courted annihilation and somehow avoided it, or in some cases returned from it. And such inexplicable, perhaps undeserved good fortune may leave an impression of a karmic bill that still needs to be paid. And for Justin the chickens have potentially come home to roost for a lapse that he only considered indulging.
Which is to say that we’re in much richer territory than that of the sort of proficient programmer that Eastwood used to toss off, like, say, “Absolute Power.” This is Eastwood working the terrain of his “Unforgiven,” one of his most searing portraits of guilt. Both films wed genre tropes and melodrama and neuroses and emotion and social symbolism together on a molecular level. Movies even geared for mass audiences often used to have a point. Eastwood reminds us of this lost art and Warner Bros. thanked him by burying “Juror #2” in a handful of theaters before dropping it unceremoniously on Demand and Max later this month. As I said, we live in a craven age.
Hoult gives one those subtly tortured leading man performances in “Juror#2” that’s destined to be taken for granted by people who assume that he’s letting his good looks do most of the work for him. Luckily, Hoult is in another movie this week that shows his range. Unluckily, the movie isn’t that great, which is a shame given the rich potential.
Justin Kurzel’s “The Order” concerns a series of bank robberies and terrorist actions in the Pacific Northwest that anticipate the re-emergence of the far right in the United States in the 1980s. Bob Mathews (Hoult) is a radical yearning to start a hot race war, while evangelical figures like Richard Butler (Victor Slezak) preach a subtler means of intimidation and control. Richard says to Bob that if they play the game and bother to speak in dog whistles, they can capture the government legally via elections. This debate is occurring not long before Mathews’ group will famously kill left-wing DJ Alan Berg (Marc Maron). Butler was prescient, but Mathews is less a political visionary than a daring mixture of holy warrior, psychopath, and adrenaline junkie.
The relationship between Mathews and Butler over the direction of the far right is easily the most compelling thread of “The Order.” Disappointingly, Kurzel is more interested in playing a traditional game of cops and robbers with drab, moody lighting and underwritten characters. FBI man Terry Husk (Jude Law) is brought on the scene, and he’s a taciturn man whose machismo simmers quietly as he smokes 400 cigarettes while looking out the window at a forbidding landscape. I enjoy a simmering pot of machismo as much as the next guy, but the subject matter here is too rich to be reduced to another game of tag, which might still have been fine if Kurzel didn’t take the film so deadly seriously. Much of the film is sluggish, vague, stultifying in its obviousness.
And yet Hoult’s performance here is startling, especially in contrast to the open boyishness that he normally utilizes. Hoult closes his physicality off here, imbuing Mathews with a coiled volatility that’s frightening and even poignant. Unlike many actors in similar roles, Hoult doesn’t wink to assure you that he’s a nice guy in real life. Without Hoult, “The Order” would be an ordinary cop thriller with art-film varnish.
“Juror # 2” is now available to rent on Amazon, and will drop on Max on Dec. 20. “The Order” is now in theaters everywhere.
