Juror #2 challenges faith and justice.
Lawfare has killed the moral imagination. Politicians and journalists accept the recent miscarriages of justice that ride roughshod over social decency and the U.S. Constitution, so it’s surprising that Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 takes a politician and a journalist for its two main characters: assistant district attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) and magazine writer Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult). Their lives cross, as prosecutor and juror, during a 2021 murder trial in Georgia.
Faith v. Justice is the film’s apparent theme, given its opening image of a statue holding the scales of justice and, later, a shot of a courtroom shield emblazoned with “In God We Trust.” Although Eastwood deliberately eschews any mechanisms that would make this dramatic conflict rousing or sensational, it is quietly compelling.
Our nation’s ongoing lawfare lingers over Faith and Justin as they struggle with their conscience — something that our real-life politicians and journalists rarely seem to do. Something untrustworthy is afoot when reviewers praise Juror #2 without mentioning this irony. The appearance of impartiality — the clean non-provocation in Eastwood’s directorial approach — differs from the moral conflicts in Jeanne Herry’s All Your Faces. Juror #2’s plain-faced style suggests that Eastwood is adopting a non-Hollywood forbearance that’s as distinctly American as All Your Faces is French.
Instead of exploring reason as French filmmakers do, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams practice sociological restraint — the quality that made Eastwood’s The Mule, Richard Jewell, and Sully so moving.
The way this courtroom drama unfolds, we observe Faith going about her prosecution while also running for reelection and Justin suffering pangs of guilt. Alcoholic Justin realizes that he crossed paths with the accused killer Sythe (Gabriel Basso) at a bar and then had a car accident that caused the death for which Sythe is being tried. The dilemma recalls Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends, post-WWII films about personal probity but without the melodramatic hype that cheapened both. Cool-tempered Eastwood teeters between melodrama and social criticism. He foregrounds Justin’s spiritual crisis as a jury member, arguing with angry blacks and feminists and siding with a gung-ho ex-cop (J. K. Simmons), to reveal the current crisis: The law is in jeopardy.
Because lawfare has shaken the foundations that hold society together, Eastwood’s ambivalence toward social criticism in his best recent films is admirable, but this is not necessarily a method for great moviemaking. Juror #2 was filmed starting June 2023 and finished production in April this year, when the most egregious lawfare ruses against President Trump reached their height — from the judicial misconduct of Judges Engoron and Merchan in Manhattan to the Fani Willis debacle in Georgia. Juror #2 makes no reference to those specific trials, but they are in the back of our consciousness. It’s impossible to watch the movie as if from a timeless perspective, outside of this political moment.
Eastwood raised the same predicament in The 15:17 to Paris and Sully when seeming to be impartial while playing off recent incidents that inspired the scripts.
Abrams says he initiated the Juror #2 script ten years ago, “not realizing that the importance of civil discourse would be greater than ever in 2024.” But some of the dialogue (“Justice is truth in action,” “Sometimes the truth isn’t justice”) defies his neutrality. After the juror-cop defends his oath “not to betray character, behavior, or public trust,” the judge asks Justin, “Do you think you can remain unbiased?” The question goes to the heart of Trump Derangement Syndrome, an obsession that imperils our legal system.
Since Eastwood is not a muckraking director like Sam Fuller or Oliver Stone, he manages his pieties without apparent partisanship — discretion that is unheard of these days. In Juror #2, the peculiarity of Eastwood’s emotional detachment evokes a Judeo-Christian background — “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” — a moral basis that is no longer part of the dominant culture.
Eventually, Collette’s rigid, defensive stare gives way to belief while Hoult’s cherubic face hides a weak, secretive nature. Faith and Justice remain at odds. Yet the story puts us in the mercy seat, the place of empathy and transference of sin. Eastwood has made a genre movie as a legal brief. He approaches forgiveness toward the American legal system recently turned to rot. Ultimately, hope hangs in the balance.