In its defiantly plainspoken way, director Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” is full of surprises, and even the ones heavy with contrivance and coincidence-based plotting settle into the overall and rather sneaky effectiveness of the movie. It’s one of his good ones. Small, modest, a little stodgy. But good, and even a little brave in its courtroom-drama willingness to dunk the audience in the main character’s soup of anxiety almost immediately.
That’s the first surprise in “Juror #2,” and while it may sound like major spoiler material, it’s not, because it’s all over the trailer and wastes little time emerging in the movie. In Savannah, Georgia, a murder trial is underway. A man is accused of killing his girlfriend after an arguably violent confrontation in a roadside bar at night, with rain and thunder for added dramatics.
Nicholas Hoult plays the title juror, a magazine writer recovering from alcohol addiction, with a child on the way. The usual questions arise in jury selection: Do you have any “personal relationship with the accused”? He answers no. He’s agitated, though; he doesn’t want to have his time carved away from his wife’s imminent delivery.
And there’s something else. Driving home one night recently, this man, Justin, had the bad luck to strike a deer crossing the road, which apparently (the flashbacks tell us) limped off into the woods. But this is not what really happened, which screenwriter and New Trier High School alum Jonathan Abrams clarifies at a daringly early point in the story.
Not everything’s out in the open, though. Like any courtroom drama, even an off-center one, other jurors harbor other suspicions, other secrets. J.K. Simmons plays a retired Midwestern police detective (Chicago, I think) whose experience leads him to doubt the prosecution’s case. Toni Collette takes the role of the prosecutor with political ambitions; her adversary in court, and her drinking buddy outside it, is the defense attorney portrayed by Chris Messina.
At this point I’m going to quit with the plot summary, because I respect incremental reveals a lot more than does the Warner Bros. marketing team. It’s enough to say that “Juror #2” presents a life-changing dilemma for Justin and his family. He is clearly a loyal husband and very likely a good parent in the making. He is also faced with a couple of extremely difficult designs for living, one a lie, the other the truth. He’s not alone in facing a crossroads of conscience in Eastwood’s film.
For me, “Juror #2” holds together even though some of the narrative developments don’t, and there’s a reason for that. Many, though not all, of Eastwood’s recent films as director boil down to a simple, shared theme of noble men whose acts of courage run afoul of everything wrong with America: the sniveling media (“Richard Jewell”), big government bureaucracy (“Sully”) or, in the case of Eastwood’s biggest hit, “American Sniper,” post-traumatic stress disorder, insufficiently cared for by both the man, a fictionalized version of Chris Kyle, and the military apparatus surrounding his short life.
“Juror #2” is a completely different undertaking — an unpretentious genre exercise, well-acted by Hoult and Collette, especially. Yet its ethical morass holds you. Its rooting interests are not fixed. Some of it’s a mite preposterous, once the flashbacks to what really happened get going in the later stages. But I can see why Eastwood went for it; it’s old-style but with some odd wrinkles. I hope it finds an audience. Courtroom dramas, after all, remain one of the hardiest genres in filmmaking, even now, when studios no longer know or care about selling a mid-budget ’90s-style courtroom drama in theaters.
To wit: Eastwood’s movie, which may be his finale, is opening in theaters in glaringly limited release. Thirty-one theaters, at last count. In the entire country. Originally slated for a streaming bow on Max, which is a business unit of Warner Bros. Discovery, “Juror #2” may well be unfashionable enough to make money theatrically. Warner Bros. is essentially guaranteeing that outcome now.
Loyalty to Eastwood is one thing, and maybe a sentimental thing. But the movie itself, cannily handled, deserved a better shot for a better reason: It works.
“Juror #2” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for some violent images and strong language)
Running time: 1:54
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Oct. 31
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.