Pop Culture Happy Hour - Juror #2

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Some people hate jury duty, but in Clint Eastwood's new film Juror #2, one guy's experience is worse than most. Nicholas Hoult plays a man assigned to serve on a jury who gradually realizes that the defendant might not be guilty. And he might just know who is. The film also stars Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, and Kiefer Sutherland. It's streaming now on Max.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Some people welcome jury duty. Some people hate it. But in the new film, Juror Number 2, directed by Clint Eastwood, a guy has a jury duty experience that is worse than most. When he hears the facts of a murder trial, he gradually realizes that the defendant might not be guilty and that he might just know who is. I'm Glenn Willey. And I'm Linda Holmes. And today we're talking about juror number two on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today is Ronald Young Jr.

he is the new host of pop culture debate club from Lemonada and the BBC. Hi, Ronald. Welcome back. Hello, Linda. I'm glad to be here. All right, juror number two is the latest film from director Clint Eastwood, who won Oscars for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, and who is now an impressive 94 years old. Here, Nicholas Holt plays Justin, a man who is assigned to serve on a jury charged with deciding whether a guy killed his girlfriend and left her by the side of the road. But, and this is the premise of the movie, so please do not call it a spoiler.

Justin realizes that on the same night, in the same place, he hit a deer. Or so he thought, could he actually be responsible for this woman's death? And what's going to happen if he tells anybody what occurred? Tony Colette plays the prosecutor. J.K. Simmons plays a fellow juror. And Kiefer Sutherland plays the lawyer who advises Justin privately that he must say nothing to anybody. or he'll definitely be thrown in jail for a very long time. Juror number two had a very limited release in theaters,

but the bigger opportunity to see it is on Max, where it's streaming now. Ronald, I want to start with you. Bottom line it on juror number two. I liked the premise. You know what? No, like is a strong word. I was intrigued by the premise.

Yes. And early in the movie, it draws you in saying, how are y'all going to do this? And it seems like they never answered that question in the writing of the movie. So they don't quite get to how we're going to do this in a way that actually makes sense. That being said, I think it's well acted, honestly. There was a lot of actors came and clocked in and did the best they could with what they had. But other than that, I wasn't, I don't know.

It's weird because I kind of want to watch it again, but I don't think I liked it, I would say. Yeah. Glenn, how are you? you feeling about this one? This is a, I don't think of you as necessarily a courtroom drama guy as much as I am. But what is your, what is your thinking? I didn't have much of a thinking. I didn't have much of a reaction. I mean, my biggest impression coming away from the film was I just kept imagining the table read, you know, the right before shooting began where all the actors are kind of standing around. They're going, well, you know, it's set in Savannah. Should we, should we do

the accent? Well, let's not do the accent. I'm not going to do the accent. And Tony Collette, bless her was like, hold my beer, hold my julep, she said. And she went for it. The state has the truth on its side. James Seith is going to pay for what he did. And I will get justice for Kendall Carter and every woman who is a victim of domestic abuse. I don't know. I mean, Eastwood is a famously efficient director, right?

This is what we know about him. He brings things under budget and on time because he only lets the actors do one or two takes and then they move on. This film feels like the kind of movie that's made. it just feels very frictionless to me and slight. And to Ronald's point, that's not what's promised here. The promise is we're going to be, this is a guy struggling with the morally gray areas of the world, but the film keeps going out of its way

to give Holt's character every out, imaginable. It so badly wants us to say, well, you can't blame the guy for not coming forward. He's in recovery. He is an expected dad of a high-risk pregnancy. He's got keeper Sutherland on his shoulder, as you say, Linda, who's only role in this film is to tell him not to come forward.

and explain, you know, very detailed reasons why? Yes. Very convenient. I thought that was, Glenn. Very convenient. Does it twice. If I come for it and I tell them the truth. With your prior to you wise, and the fact that you were in a bar gives us a state reason to charge you with first degree vehicular homicide or even felony murder. That's 30 years to life. What? If you were to come forward right now, it would be completely screwed.

There's a big ass deer crossing sign at exactly the place where it needs to be. It's like, does he also foster a sense? puppies, does he also deliver meals on wheels? Like, this film is working so hard to establish him as a good man that it doesn't really engage with morality in any real way, he doesn't seem willing to paint him as anything less than a white knight. At one point, he describes himself as a good man. And the film wants you to just sit there, go, yep, yes, he is. And it would have been such a cheerier, more substantive film if the film trusted us to kind of decide that for ourselves. But it doesn't, it just, you know, it doesn't even let us consider that he isn't good.

I mean, it's fine. Yeah, the thing about this is directors who are are super experienced, which Clint Eastwood is, he's made 40-some movies, tend to bring with them, as he does here, the people that they've worked with for a long time. This is not going to be an incompetently made movie from a filmmaking perspective. It is absolutely nicely made, I think. This is a very talented ensemble. I like Nicholas Holt. I tend to find him a very sympathetic central figure. But I have two major problems with this movie, and they both are script problems, honestly. The first is, in order to set up the reality of what has happened, they have to make it so that, A, he did nothing really wrong. They apparently do not count distracted driving, which

has gotten a lot of people in trouble. He got out to check. He thought it was a deer, because like Glenn said, There's a deer crossing sign right there. Also, absolutely nobody else knows anything about this so that if he doesn't come forward, it's completely, there's no chance he's going to be caught. You have to make it so that he went to a bar as a person in recovery, order to drink, didn't drink it, and left. So that Kiefer Sutherland can tell him, nobody will ever believe that's what happened. They'll believe you were drinking. The amount of kind of convoluted stuff they have to work up in order to make all this happen is kind of ridiculous to me and distracting because you can just feel the effort that they're putting in.

This is the kind of movie where they want to be like, you can imagine this happening. And I'm like, very, very unlikely actually. The other thing is, I don't think a moral gray area is really what we're talking about, particularly late. in the movie. What we're talking about is flawed humanity where people don't want to take responsibility for what they did because the criminal justice system is going to be very punitive to him. So it is perhaps understandable that he does not want to subject himself to that. Now, the movie also goes a little bit in the direction of being like, can you imagine if a person who was subject to the criminal justice system was also a person with a family? It's like, yeah.

That's mostly what happens. Like, that's not a revolutionary thing. What's revolutionary to maybe is this idea of like, what if he looked like Nicholas Holt? And he was really a clean cut white guy. Like, I don't understand that part of it. Y'all both said this. They present the case as if, well, we already know who did it. Why are y'all presenting it in this way as if all the evidence points to defend it to a conviction?

So much so that we. walk into the jury room and one of the jurors says the lawyer didn't prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt that he's innocent. And I said, strike her from the jury immediately. And then Nicholas Holtz, like, that's not how it works. That's not like, so he's like the noble person trying to give the guy a fair shake, which is also convenient. Don't you want to get home to your pregnant wife? Of course I do. All right, so what's the problem? If this is somebody's life we're dealing with, shouldn't we at least talk about it?

And then the other thing is, there's three comps I was taking a flight with Denzel Washington from 2012, which of course deals with whether it was right or wrong in terms of his alcoholism and how it interacted with how he landed the plane. Then there's The Night of, which was the HBO series, which was basically a horror movie about the criminal justice system. And it did what this movie is trying to do much better. And then, of course, when this movie was trying to be 12 Angry Men, I actually thought it was a better movie. I'm like, when we were just in there with the jurors debating the case. Very 12. Some pretty straight lifts from 12 Angry Men.

The man made a positive identification. Yeah, but dude, it's kind of ancient, though. Well, this old bird has 20-20 vision with my glasses. I think Hitchcock played in the same sandbox. He allowed his characters, even the innocent men who are wrongly accused. He allowed them to have feet of clay to make bad decisions, be flawed. Because it's a hell a lot more interesting than to set them up like these paragon's a virtue like Nicholas Holt is.

And just on the issue of how frictionless this seems, this film ends up attempting to say something about how cops fixate on the suspect in front of them. There is an extended, I didn't quite buy conversation in the jury room about how that's, there's not malice there. It's just overworked cops doing their jobs. And I was like, well, how would this film hit different if the defendant was black? You know what I mean? Like, we can't talk about the ending, but the ending would hit so much.

differently, so much more substantively, so much more real than this kind of diversion for a, you know, a Sunday afternoon on the couch. Yeah. Yeah. I try very hard not to be this person because I, you know, I've never been a criminal lawyer. You know, I don't have any more capacity to pass on this than the average person who watches a lot of law and order. However, I also think, A, there's no way that the guy who's on trial would ever end up on trial. And B, there's no way that Nicholas Holt could ever get convicted based on the evidence that they would have. Because, and again, this is all premise.

It's kind of, we found her body badly damaged by the side of the road. Someone must have beat her up, and it was probably you. That is not how you convict people of a crime, logically speaking, right? It takes a hilarious amount of time in this movie for someone

to say, well, we know that she was walking along the side of a road with no shoulder at night in the rain coming home from a bar, I wonder if she could have been hit by a car. That seems to have never occurred to the prosecutor or the defense attorney. And Nicholas Holt, if he comes forward and says, well, I hit something that night and I thought it was a deer. If they put him on trial, if I'm his attorney, I go in and I say, didn't you already put somebody else on trial and didn't your medical examiner confidently testified that she was beaten to death? Correct. Couldn't that still be true? Yes.

Couldn't he have hit a deer? Like, I think this entire dilemma is a lot of nonsense. I absolutely agree. And I think that is kind of, if you think about the combination of this script maybe not being completely fleshed out or challenged in any way and combine that with Clint Eastwood being a very efficient director, you kind of, get exactly to me what's in the script in this film. And, you know, there have been people that really show some affection towards this movie, which I'm very baffled by because of all the things that we just said. I actually wrote in my notes, is the jury stupid question?

I was just so confused by, because everyone was certain, well, the evidence points to the boyfriend, it's definitely the boyfriend. At the very least, they're easily led. Yeah, well, but see, that's the thing. Like, I guess the reason why I wrote that is because I'm like, there's no way in the world in any jury room in America. And maybe I'm completely wrong. That based on the evidence that we just saw, which I think the movie did not do a very good job of presenting it as being like compelling evidence for them all to agree that this person was guilty, there's no way in the world that there's not at least like four or five people in the room. We're like, no, absolutely not.

What are you talking about? This could have happened to anyone. This is all circumstantial. Anyone could have said that in the room. So to add this extra dilemma of Nick being like, well, actually it was me. You know what I mean? Like it was like entirely unnecessary because the evidence, the case was weak enough that this dude should have gotten off anyway. Yep.

There have been some folks in the critical community and the film Twitter community who are angry that this film did not get a sustained theatrical run. It's like a sign of disrespect to the filmmaker. I get that small film should get theatrical runs. I do. I agree that studio should support the films that get made. I have a tough time generating a lot of dudgeon over this because this is not the hill to die on this film, especially when it is so ideally suited to 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon. I think if you are interested in this film, which for the performances, for the filmmaking, you know, if you like a courtroom drama, which I do, you know, I didn't hate this movie. I just don't think that there's a lot to it and it's pretty ridiculous, right?

A lot of courtroom dramas are from a reality perspective and a law perspective pretty ridiculous. And that's fine. But it was interesting to me, there were some interviews with the cast and the production notes for this movie. And certainly when they talked to the cast, some of them said, I thought this was an interesting story, whatever. But a bunch of them said, because it was Clint Eastwood, because it was Clint Eastwood, because it was clean Eastwood. And that's fine. I think that's fine. There are people for whom I would probably do exactly the same thing, a chance to work with this person, you know, whose work has meant so much to me, who is, I think is so gifted and whatever.

But it may mean that you can get to a point where a project seems kind of more substantial than it perhaps is. Yeah. And look, at the end of the day, you had some great actors here. And I think they filmed some of it on location in Savannah. So J.K.K. Simmons, Tony Collette, Chris Messina, Kiefer Sutherland, Zoe Deutsch. I hope they had some good brisket, right? I hope they got some good shrimp and grits. I hope they had a good time.

Just a quick note about J.K. Simmons, I will say that when he showed up and started doing his J.K. Simmons thing, I did lean forward. I always want that. And I got 22 years on the street that is telling me there's a lot more to this case than we know. But then he walks out at some point and never returns. And I said, wait, no, no, wait, no. This was really interesting. And I think that happened with these actors. They were kind of squandered in their usage.

But because I saw them, I expected more from them, which is kind of one of those things where if you're watching an episode of Law and Order, if you get like John Stamos in there, you're like, well, John Stamos definitely did it. You know what I mean? But it just, that wasn't the case in this, you know? Yeah. I think my bottom line on this movie is, I didn't hate this movie. It's streaming on Max, as I said.

I like a courtroom drama. If you like a courtroom drama, this is one. That is my glowing recommendation. We want to know what you think about juror number two. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash pcc-h and on Letterboxed at letterboxed.com slash NPR pop culture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show, Ronald Young Jr., Glenn Weldon.

Thanks so much for being here. I would never vote to convict either one of you of anything. Not guilty, Linda. Thank you, Linda. This episode is produced by Liz Metzger and Lenin Sherburn and edited by Jessica Reedy and Mike Katzoff. Hello, come in provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

You are listener number one. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all tomorrow.