In Review: 'Juror #2,' 'Here'

Clint Eastwood continues (and maybe concludes) a late-career streak of compelling films with a courtroom drama while Robert Zemeckis travels the years without moving the camera.

Juror #2
Dir. Clint Eastwood
114 min.

The hook for Juror #2, another late-career gem from 94-year-old director Clint Eastwood, is a doozy: What if an ordinary guy on jury duty for a vehicular homicide case realized that he was the one who committed the crime? That maybe the deer he struck one dark and stormy night wasn’t a deer at all? A premise like that risks outright absurdity, inviting a scenario where the accused is spared by the most outrageously dramatic courtroom revelation in history. But that’s not the way Eastwood and his screenwriter, Jonathan Abrams, play it, and it’s certainly not the way his superb cast, led by Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette (in an About a Boy reunion!), perform it, either. Eastwood has often made dramas about characters who try to do the right thing under difficult or compromised circumstances and he takes Juror #2 seriously enough to see it through. No angle goes unexplored, no motive or detail unscrutinized. 

A sense of unease grips the film well before Justin Kemp (Hoult) reluctantly accepts his civic responsibility for jury duty. He and his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) are deep in the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy after experiencing past losses, and their anxiety is worsened both by a failed previous attempt and Justin’s tenuous hold on his sobriety. Yet Justin proves an acceptable juror to Faith Killebrew (Collette), an ambitious prosecutor needing a win to secure a hotly contested election, and to a public defender (Chris Messina) who’s trying to do his best for a guilty-seeming client (Gabriel Basso) who’s actually innocent. At a roadside bar in Savannah, Georgia, Killebrew contends, the defendant and his girlfriend got into a heated argument that ended with her walking away on a rainy night. He then followed her in his car, struck her in the head with a blunt object, and pushed her into a rocky creek off the road. 

As both lawyers make their opening statements, an alternate narrative unfolds in Justin’s head, which Eastwood stages as rigorously as the flashbacks in his 2016 film Sully. Justin was at the bar that night, too, ordering a drink in a moment of despair but leaving before taking a sip. He hit what he legitimately assumed was a deer but now realizes was the victim. The moral thing to do would be to step forward and accept the consequences, but given his alcoholism and past DUI offenses, he would likely be sentenced harshly. So the most palatable solution is to steer the jury to a “not guilty” verdict, a perverse 12 Angry Men scenario in which he may be correctly muddying up an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, but not foremost in the service of justice. Ironically, if he wasn’t personally involved in the victim’s death, Justin would likely have added his vote to 11 other wrong ones. 

Juror #2 doesn’t let him off so easily, however, and it tests our identification with a father-to-be who is trying to orchestrate the best outcome for himself, his family and the defendant. It also adds dimension to Collette’s prosecutor, who faces the political pressure to push for a seemingly easy victory, but starts to question the merits of her own case as the jury remains deadlocked. The consequences for her doing the right thing may not be as significant as Justin’s, but prosecutors are not celebrated for flubbing high-profile cases and she’s in no mood to sabotage her political career for finding faults in her own argument. Justin and Hillebrew are on a collision course. 

There’s a meat-and-potatoes quality to Juror #2 that, in Eastwood’s hands, feels richly satisfying, because original courtroom dramas are not exactly in high demand in Hollywood. (Indeed, David Zaslov’s Warner Bros. has shown no faith in the film, which is a grievous insult to a living legend who has made the studio a fortune overall and who has delivered a drama worth supporting.) But Eastwood’s late-career deliberateness behind the camera serves the material beautifully, not unlike a juror who insists on talking through an important case rather than rushing everyone back to their families. Abrams’ script broadens out to include a few crucial supporting characters—J.K Simmons as a retired police detective on the jury is particularly fine—and he pulls a few surprises that enhance, rather than cheapen, the moral dilemma at the heart of the film. And if the final shot of Juror #2 turns out to be the final shot of Eastwood’s career, consider the case of his directorial greatness closed. — Scott Tobias

Juror #2 opens in theaters tonight, but you might have to hunt for it thanks to Warner Bros.’ decision to give it a limited release. (We’re really mad about this at Reveal headquarters.)

Here
Dir. Robert Zemeckis
104 min.

First the good news about Here: It’s undoubtedly the most out-there formally adventurous film released by a major studio in years, maybe ever. Apparently playing with house money (and an indulgent house), Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth have adapted Richard McGuire’s acclaimed 2014 graphic novel in a style as close to the source material as possible. McGuire’s book remains fixed in a static location with the smaller panels within its frame serving as windows into what occurred on that spot over the course of millions of years (but with a particular focus on the events of the late-20th and early 21st centuries). Zemeckis’ film does the same, creating the illusion of a camera fixed in a single place, sometimes depicting events in the early, mid, and late 20th century, sometimes of hundreds (or more) years in the past, sometimes in the present, and so on, letting them overlap with one another via images within images that create the sense of an eternal present in which all time takes place at once. It’s admirably audacious!

Now, the bad news: Here is also borderline excruciating. The opening of the film plays like it belongs on a Zemeckis highlight reel, alongside the first moments of Contact or almost any moment of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But once the novelty wears off, it quickly becomes clear that the film doesn’t really have anything else to offer. Where McGuire’s book found quiet profundity in depicting rhyming moments across the eons, this adaptation mostly contents itself with flashing back and forth from era to era. That occasionally produces a compelling moment or depicts a meaningful coincidence. A TV playing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan remains turned on while the rest of the scene’s action switches to a wedding a few weeks later. The events of the 1918 pandemic echo that of the 2020s. A nearby colonial home belonging to Ben Franklin’s son can still be seen in the background at a Halloween party attended by multiple Ben Franklins. But the overwhelming sense left by the film is, yep, a lot of things can happen in a single spot.

When the focus falls on the lives lived at the film’s only location, more problems surface. Here fills the gaps of McGuire’s elliptical approach with sappy storytelling, mostly concerning Richard and Margaret, a couple played as teens, senior citizens, and everything in between by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (who join Zemeckis and Roth to make here a Forrest Gump reunion). They experience love, loss, and disappointment of the sort seen in movies many times before, albeit never depicted via an unmoving camera and some truly disturbing special effects. Using new, AI-powered effects technology, Here uses images of its stars over the years to recreate them at different ages (and project them into a wrinklier, grayer future). Weirdly, the teen incarnations of Hanks and Wright look more convincing than the scenes that render them in middle age, but in any decade they never look fully human, nor do their characters’ story feel like it needs to be told or lead to any revelations more profound than the variations on “time flies” spoken several times over the course of the film. It does. But sometimes it doesn’t fly fast enough. —Keith Phipps

Here drops into theaters tonight.