In Juror #2, Clint Eastwood Puts American Justice on Trial
What is justice?
For as long as Clint Eastwood has been making movies—which is to say, a very long time—that question has occupied him more than any other.
In 1973’s High Plains Drifter, he told the story of an almost ghost-like figure who came into town to bring it together against a gang of enemies. More recently, in Richard Jewell, he examined the life of a man wrongly convicted in the media for a public crime he did not commit. Eastwood’s most famous quote as an actor—”Do you feel lucky, punk?”—is a gruff nod to the vagaries of fate and the ambiguities of justice. In Unforgiven, probably his best film, he told the story of a retired killer brought back for one more hit. The movie’s most memorable line was something of a mission statement for the filmmaker: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Clint Eastwood makes movies about how we don’t always get what we deserve. Luck, fate, and the menace and decency of other men mean humans are never fully in control of our own lives. The question is what choices people make with whatever life hands them.
So it is in his latest, and possibly last, film, Juror #2, a tricky, nuanced thriller about a man caught in a justice system conundrum. The title refers to the number given to Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a soon-to-be father whose wife is in the midst of a high-risk pregnancy. Kemp is selected to be a juror on the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), who is charged with murdering his girlfriend after an argument at a bar, then dumping her body in a creek.
Sythe has all the signs of a killer: a tough demeanor, neck tattoos, and a former life in a drug-running gang. He looks the part.
But Kemp soon realizes his own culpability in the case: On the night the woman died, he stopped by the bar in question, bought a drink he didn’t touch, and then on the drive home hit what he thought was a deer at the exact spot where the woman’s body was found. Kemp could just admit this. But he has a history of alcoholism, and a jury
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