THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
I knew it at least since then The Man from the High Plains (1973), his second feature as a director, Clint Eastwood is the quintessential comeback man. From the shadows of classic cinema, of a youth forever gone, and even of his own death, constantly foreshadowed. Author at the age of 94 of a now monumental work, the impassive ghost dies Juror #2, as is often the case, a film of excellent quality, from which his body this time is missing but in which his spirit persists. Such is the situation in Hollywood now that the smallest Clint Eastwood film can, by understanding the complexity required by fiction, have the effect of a The Critique of Pure Reason.
This is a trial movie coupled with a thriller. Lived, as they say, from the subjective experience of “Juror no. 2”Justin Kemp, a tall and handsome guy who looks a bit like a young Clint Eastwood (English actor Nicholas Hoult plays him), good and loyal husband to a wife about to give birth to her first child. Being named a juror in a homicide case implicitly opens up the existence of another couple of roughly the same age who turn out to be his hellish counterpoint. In fact, her body was just found lifeless on the side of a road. As for him, a notorious drug dealer and a fat thug (Gabriel Basso, from the series The night agent), is suspected of killing her after leaving a bar where, drunk, they had a public breakup.
The first, in the company of his colleagues, will therefore be brought to judge the innocence or guilt of the second, who is overwhelmed by everything. Including the implacable gaze of an assistant district attorney (Toni Collette, with all the necessary arrogance) in the midst of a campaign to climb the upper echelon, all the more willing to close the case smoothly with what’s at hand. The film really comes together, never letting up, with Kemp’s first “visions”. Like Clint Eastwood, the young man suffers from reminiscences. Haunted by the past. Through his own past, in this case.
Mixed world
With small touches, as visions engulf him during the process, the story of a couple less sunny, less solid than it might have seemed. Two crying children. Kemp’s drinking ordeal. Self-help groups. Recurrence of an evening in the same bar where the other couple is torn apart. The girl running away from the bar chased by her boyfriend. The car we take after them at night and in the pouring rain to return home. The violent impact of an unidentified corpse on the hood. Let the reader rest assured, we have here betrayed nothing that cannot be betrayed. These revelations come early enough in the film for the presumption of Kemp’s guilt, and therefore the innocence of the man we’re trying to judge, to circumscribe the actual terrain on which this film will unfold.
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