Re: Juror #2: A Recommendation

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

I watched Clint Eastwood's latest film, Juror #2, last night and wanted
to urge everyone to watch it. I thought it was a very good exploration
of honour and cowardice, all via the vehicle of a courtroom drama.

I *really* don't want to say much about this film for fear of spoiling
the surprise when you watch it so I'll give a brief outline of the
situation.

A woman has been found dead in a creek at the side of a road. She has
only been dead a few hours. Cause of death is an undetermined blunt
instrument which has not been found. It is soon determined that she was
at a roadhouse on the road beside which she was found. Witnesses
recounted an argument that she'd had with her boyfriend. They'd argued
in the roadhouse and he'd smashed a beer bottle but hadn't hurt her
physically. She left and he followed her out, arguing further out in the
parking lot. She broke it off with him and walked off in a huff,
apparently heading home. The boyfriend had gotten in his car and set off
in the same  direction. The boyfriend had a history of being in a
violent gang but had cleaned up his act in recent years. The boyfriend
is arrested and charged with murder.

A pool of potential jurors is summoned and a 30ish man whose wife is
expecting their first child is one of them but he intends to try to get
out of the jury duty. He fails and is designated Juror #2.

The rest of the jury is chosen and the trial begins. The prosecutor has
substantial evidence while the public defender has no alibi witness to
offer and confines himself to raising reasonable doubt whenever
possible. However, all is not as it seems. As the trial proceeds and the
testimony is heard, it becomes clear that juror #2 has a connection to
the events surrounding the young woman's death. His actions form the
core of the story so I will not discuss them except to say that he must
make a decision to be either honourable or cowardly. Both decisions
carry grave consequences.

I like this kind of movie because it makes me wonder how I would react
in that situation.

The actor playing juror #2 is Nicholas Hoult, who I've never seen
before. I've never seem most of the other actors in anything else,
although some of the names are familiar to me. There are SOME familiar
faces, including Leslie Bibb as the jury foreperson, J. K. Simmons as
another juror, and Kiefer Sutherland (in a small role). The judge,
played by Amy Aquino, is also familiar to me, most recently as Bosch's
superior in a few seasons of Bosch.

The film runs two hours. I see that IMDB rates it only a 7.0.
Personally, I think it deserves better. Maybe the people that rated it
were hoping for Clint to appear - he only directs - or were expecting
car chases and special effects.

I knew someone on Usenet had watched this; I borrowed the BluRay disc
from the library. I foumd Rhino's thread.

It wasn't that expensive a movie to make. Warner Bros. gave it a limited
release with a more than adequate box office that it should have been
given a wide release. Instead, it ended up on Max, advertised as
original to television. Clint Eastwood was 93 during production and this
may be the last movie he directs.

I liked the premise a lot, and the setup is believable, that it's a
small enough area and the bar was popular enough that both the defendant
and the juror could have been drinking there at the same time.

The performances were fine. I especially liked Chris Messina as the
public defender, who for once thought he was representing an innocent
man.

I find it hard to believe that one can be empaneled as a juror if one's
crazed manic-depressive hippie mother is the prosecutor (Toni Collette).

Even though we see court, it's not a legal procedural. We get a bit of
voir dire in selecting a few jurors, opening and closing arguments and
a bit of direct and cross examination of witnesse, but we see little
discussion of the law and I think I recall one of the attorneys objecting
without stating the objection. Instead, court is used as a framing
device. We don't get testimony; we get backstory.

I found the movie disappointing and I blame bad plotting.

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After hearing the prosecution's opening statement, Kemp begins to
realize that he was at the same bar that night. He's a drunk and has had
DUI convictions. He's depressed as it's the anniversary of his wife's
miscarriage; twins. We get the dramatic moment, in flashback, of Kemp
ordering and being served the drink, but staring at it and not drinking,
something that real life drunks do when they are recovering.

He realizes that he left the bar on the night of and on the same route
that the drunk, angry, victim was walking after having her 2000th public
drunken fight with her boyfriend, the defendant.

He thinks it's possible that he ran into her accidentally and killed
her. He knew he hit something but getting out of the vehicle, couldn't
find anything.

The prosecution's theory of the crime is that the defendent followed the
victim, confronted her on the side of the road, struck her with a blunt
instrument (possibly a river rock), then tossed her body into the creek.

The autopsy didn't establish shit. Did she die soon after the fatal
blow, or did she die hours later from an untreated subdural hematoma or
some similar brain injury, or did she bleed out slowly, or die from
exposure? It wasn't stated.

If a vehicle deliberately or accidentally collided with her, she'd have
suffered entirely different trauma, like leg and back injuries if she
were still walking, or obvious crushing from the weight of the vehicle
if she'd fallen before being run over, injuries that would be the width
of a tire.

We've all watched enough episodes of Quincy, M.E., to know that if a
pedestrian is struck by a vehicle, then the injuries will occur on the
body at the height of the bumper.

From what little we knew about her injuries, then Kemp couldn't have
either run into her or run over her by accident.

Near the end of the trial, the prosecutor looks into vehicles that had
bodywork shortly thereafter, goes to Kemp's home and interviews his
wife. She repeats lies he had told her, not wanting her to know that
he'd been to the bar.

Whoa, Nelly!

That's jury tampering! The prosecutor can't not know it was Kemp's
house! She's got information on the entire jury pool!

I thought she had begum to wonder about Kemp, but in the revelation at
the end, it only dawns on her that she'd interviewed Kemp's wife having
seen Kemp at sentencing, while she was waiting for the judge's sentence.