Juror #2

Summary

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Juror #2 – Detailed Summary

Introduction to the Episode

In the December 24, 2024 episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, hosts Linda Holmes, Ronald Young Jr., and Glenn Weldon delve into Clint Eastwood's latest film, Juror Number 2. This courtroom drama explores the complexities of jury duty through the lens of a man facing unexpected moral dilemmas.

Overview of Juror Number 2

Juror Number 2 stars Nicholas Hoult as Justin, a man summoned to serve on a jury for a murder trial. The defendant is accused of killing his girlfriend and abandoning her by the roadside. As the trial progresses, Justin begins to suspect that he might actually know who the real perpetrator is, leading him to grapple with the decision of whether to come forward with this unsettling possibility. The film also features Toni Collette as the prosecutor, J.K. Simmons as a fellow juror, and Kiefer Sutherland as a lawyer advising Justin to remain silent to avoid severe legal repercussions.

Discussion by the Hosts

Ronald Young Jr.'s Perspective

Ronald Young Jr. opens the discussion intrigued by the film's premise but expresses disappointment in its execution. At [02:46], he states, “I was intrigued by the premise,” but soon critiques the script, noting, “they don't quite get to how we're going to do this in a way that actually makes sense.” Young Jr. appreciates the acting but feels the movie fails to explore its moral questions deeply, leaving him unsure about his overall enjoyment.

Glenn Weldon's Perspective

Glenn Weldon offers a critical take on the film’s believability and direction. At [04:43], he remarks, “This film feels like the kind of movie that's made. It just feels very frictionless to me and slight.” Weldon criticizes the film for presenting Justin as an almost flawless character, making it hard to engage with the moral ambiguity that the story aims to explore. He adds, “[The film] is working so hard to establish him as a good man that it doesn't really engage with morality in any real way” ([06:24]).

Linda Holmes's Perspective

Linda Holmes provides a balanced view, acknowledging the film’s craftsmanship while highlighting significant script issues. She points out the unrealistic aspects of the plot, such as the plausibility of Justin not being caught if he were involved in the murder ([06:58]). Holmes also compares Juror Number 2 to classic courtroom dramas like 12 Angry Men, suggesting that the film falls short in delivering a compelling jury deliberation ([09:40]).

Critical Analysis

The hosts collectively critique the film’s script and character development. Ronald Young Jr. draws comparisons to other courtroom dramas, stating, “there's three comps. I was thinking of Flight with Denzel Washington... 12 Angry Men” ([10:19]). He argues that the evidence in the film is too weak to justify the unanimous conviction portrayed, making the moral dilemma seem unnecessary and unconvincing.

Glenn Weldon adds that the film fails to present flawed humanity, instead opting for a "white knight" protagonist, which diminishes the story’s potential depth ([06:24]). He questions the film’s handling of racial dynamics, pondering how the narrative would differ if the defendant were a person of color ([11:42]).

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Despite its strong cast, including notable performances by J.K. Simmons and Toni Collette, Juror Number 2 struggles with a script that the hosts find lacking in substance and realism. Linda Holmes concludes that while the film is well-made and enjoyable for fans of courtroom dramas, it does not offer much beyond its basic premise ([15:22]). The episode wraps up with an invitation for listeners to share their thoughts on the film, emphasizing the hosts' appreciation for the acting and production quality despite the narrative shortcomings.

Notable Quotes

• Ronald Young Jr. on the film's premise: “I was intrigued by the premise” ([03:53]).
• Glenn Weldon on the film’s frictionless feel: “It just feels very frictionless to me and slight” ([05:20]).
• Linda Holmes on script issues: “They have to make it so that he did nothing really wrong” ([06:07]).
• Ronald Young Jr. on the jury's decision-making: “There's no way in the world that there's not at least like four or five people in the room who are like, no” ([14:12]).

Final Thoughts

Juror Number 2 presents an interesting setup but fails to fully capitalize on its potential, according to Linda Holmes, Ronald Young Jr., and Glenn Weldon. While the film boasts strong performances and solid direction from Clint Eastwood, its narrative and script leave much to be desired, making it a mixed recommendation for listeners interested in courtroom dramas.

For more insights and discussions on the latest in pop culture, join NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour on Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH and on Letterboxd @letterboxd.com/NPRpopculture.

Transcript

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Linda Holmes]

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.

[Glenn Weldon]

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 Wilton.

[Linda Holmes]

And I'm Linda Holmes. And today we're talking about Juror Number two on Pop Culture Happy Hour from npr.

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[Linda Holmes]

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.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Hello Linda. I'm glad to be here.

[Linda Holmes]

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 Hoult 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? Toni Collette 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.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

I liked the premise. You know what? No, like is a strong word. I was intrigued by the premise.

[Linda Holmes]

Yes.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

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 and did the best they could with what they had, but other than that, I wasn't. I don't know. It's weird. Cause I kind of want to watch it again, but I don't think I liked it.

[Linda Holmes]

I would say, yeah. Glenn, how are 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. No, but what is your thinking?

[Glenn Weldon]

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, was I just kept imagining the table read, you know, right before shooting began, where all the actors are kind of standing around and they're going, well, you know, it's set in Savannah. Should we do the accent? Well, let's not do the accent. I'm not gonna do the accent. You're gonna do the accent. And Toni Collette, bless her, was like, hold my beer, hold my julep. She said. And she went for it.

[Linda Holmes]

The state has the truth on its side. James Se is gonna pay for what he did. And I will get justice for Kendall Carter and every woman who is a victim of domestic abuse.

[Glenn Weldon]

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. Cause 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 gonna 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. You know, he's in recovery. He is an expectant dad of a high risk pregnancy. He's got Kiefer Sutherland on his shoulder, as you say, Linda, whose only role in this film is to tell him not to come forward and explain, you know, very detailed reasons why.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Yes, very convenient. I thought that was Glenn. Very convenient. Very convenient.

[Glenn Weldon]

He does it twice for something, right?

[Unknown Speaker]

If I come forward and I tell them the truth, with your prior DUIs and the fact that you were at a bar gives 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, you would be completely screwed.

[Glenn Weldon]

There's a big ass deer crossing sign at exactly the place where it needs to be. It's like, does he also foster sick 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.

[Linda Holmes]

Yeah. The thing about this is directors who 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 Hoult. 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. Cause 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 gonna be caught. You have to make it so that he went to a bar as a person in recovery, ordered a 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 Hoult and he was really a clean cut white guy? Like, I. I don't understand that part of it.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

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 the defendant 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.

[Linda Holmes]

And then Nicholas Holt's 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.

[Glenn Weldon]

Don't you want to get home to your pregnant wife?

[Unknown Speaker]

Of course I do.

[Linda Holmes]

All right, so what's the problem now?

[Unknown Speaker]

If this is somebody's life we're dealing with, shouldn't we at least talk about it?

[Ronald Young Jr.]

And then the other thing is, there's three comps. I was thinking of 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 was. 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.

[Linda Holmes]

Very well. Some pretty straight lifts from 12 Angry Men.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

The man made a positive identification. Yeah, but dude's kind of ancient, though.

[Linda Holmes]

Well, this old bird has 2020 vision with my glasses.

[Glenn Weldon]

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 of a lot more interesting than to set them up like these paragons of virtue like Nicholas Hoult 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 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?

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Yup.

[Glenn Weldon]

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 Sunday afternoon on the couch.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Yeah.

[Linda Holmes]

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 Hoult 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 testify that she was beaten to death?

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Correct.

[Linda Holmes]

Couldn't that still be true?

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Yes.

[Linda Holmes]

Couldn't he have hit a deer? Like, I think this entire dilemma is a lot of nonsense.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

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 mark. I'm just so confused by cuz everyone was certain. Well, the evidence points to the boyfriend. It's definitely the boyfriend.

[Linda Holmes]

At the very least, they're easily led.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Yeah, well, but see, that's the thing. 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 who are 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 a 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.

[Glenn Weldon]

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 a sign of disrespect to the filmmaker. I get that small film should get theatrical runs. I do. I agree that studios should support the films that get made. I have a tough time generating a lot of dudgeon over this. Cause this is not the hill to die on this film, especially when it is so ideally suited to 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.

[Linda Holmes]

I think if you are interested in this film, which. For the performances, for the. 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 in 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 Clint 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.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah.

[Glenn Weldon]

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.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

So.

[Glenn Weldon]

J.K. simmons, Toni Collette, Chris Messina, Kiefer Sutherland, Zoey Deutch. I hope they had some good brisket. Right. I hope they got some good shrimp and grits. I hope they had a good time.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Just 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.

[Linda Holmes]

I always want that.

[Glenn Weldon]

And I got 22 years on the street that is telling me there's a lot more to this case than we know.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

But then he walks out at some point and never returns. And I said, wait, no, no, wait, no, this was really interesting. So and I think that happened with these actors, like, 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.

[Linda Holmes]

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 PCHH and on [e-mail] NPRpopculture 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.

[Ronald Young Jr.]

Not guilty.

[Glenn Weldon]

Linda.

[Linda Holmes]

This episode is produced by Liz Metzger and Lennon Sherburn and edited by Jessica Reedy and Mike Katsif. Hello. Come in. Provides Arthur 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.

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