A courtroom drama best viewed from home : NPR

There’s been a bit of consternation flying around about the fact that the theatrical release of Juror #2, directed by Clint Eastwood, was very muted. (It’s now on Max.) It has struck some people, particularly some Eastwood fans, as unfair to give short shrift to the 94-year-old director’s latest work.

But this is a movie that is perfect to watch at home. It belongs at home.

(Some mild early-plot spoilers follow, but they are not important to your enjoyment of the movie.)

The film has a terrific premise: Justin (Nicholas Hoult) gets called for jury duty, which he’s not excited about, since his wife is extremely pregnant and he’d rather just get out of it. But he can’t, and he ends up serving on a case where a man (Gabriel Basso) is accused of beating his girlfriend to death and leaving her by the side of the road after they had a drunken fight at a bar. But Justin quickly realizes that he was at the bar that night, and while he didn’t drink, he was upset. When he left, he took his eyes off the road and hit a deer — or so he thought. Now he wonders: Might he actually have hit this woman himself? And what is he supposed to do now?

The maneuvering that has to happen to make this even mildly plausible is impressive in its precision: He is a recovering alcoholic who went to a bar but didn’t drink, but his sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) assures him that nobody will believe he was sober and he will rot in jail if he tells the truth. There are both a giant deer-crossing sign and a bridge at the exact point where the incident happened, so that when, in flashbacks, Justin gets out of the car to find out what he hit, he sees the sign, but might just miss the woman’s body, because it may have flown over the side of the bridge.

The legal plot, too, has so many holes in it that it’s more holes than plot itself. As the prosecutor (Toni Collette) prepares to bring the case, nobody thinks that maybe this woman found by the side of the road who left a bar in the dark in the rain was hit by a car, rather than beaten to death with a weapon — of which there’s no sign? (The case against the defendant, her boyfriend, amounts to “we don’t know what happened to her, so she was probably, what? Beaten to death? And it was probably you, since we don’t know anybody else who would have done it.”) Justin’s sponsor (who’s a lawyer!) doesn’t point out that it’s still entirely possible he did hit a deer, given that sign, and that proving otherwise would be a very tall order, especially after they put somebody else on trial?

Suffice it to say that this is a classic hum-through plot, meaning you have to hum loudly to yourself at the silly parts so that you don’t notice how silly they are. But that’s OK! That’s true of many perfectly serviceable courtroom dramas, which is what this is. I miss serviceable courtroom dramas. There should be more of them. And I’ve got nothing against this one, particularly. Clint Eastwood is an experienced and knowledgeable director; you’re not going to suddenly get a bad product. It’s fine!

But the serviceable courtroom drama is a genre that’s well-suited to being watched at home. They could have made this a mid-level Max streaming series, to be honest, dragging it out to six episodes or so, and that would have been fine, too. (Might have given J.K. Simmons, who has a strangely abbreviated role as a fellow juror, more to do.)

It would certainly be nice to see a healthier theater environment, where courtroom dramas could become hits like they could in the olden days (A Few Good Men was the tenth highest-grossing movie of 1993!) The same could be said of sports movies, romantic comedies, adult dramas – I mean, the rest of the domestic top ten of 1993 includes Jurassic Park, The Fugitive, The Firm, Sleepless in Seattle, Mrs. Doubtfire, Indecent Proposal, In the Line of Fire, Aladdin and Cliffhanger. This year’s domestic top 10 (thus far) is nine sequels and Wicked. That’s a bummer.

But that’s happening across the board. Clint Eastwood was not singled out for disrespect; the couch is just where people see regular movies now. And if viewing is going to shift toward home, this film, which is thoroughly and entirely OK, belongs there as much as any.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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