Juror #2 (2024)

We can’t say with certainty that Juror #2 will be director Clint Eastwood’s last picture, but he turns 95 this year so it’s not outside the realm of possibility. As a dedicated middlebrow filmmaker, Eastwood—like his spiritual brother Ron Howard, who we first knew in our living rooms as Rowdy Yates and Opie Taylor—makes pictures that make people feel good, with optional additional moral instruction. That’s the long and short of it: Unforgiven, American Sniper, Gran Torino, Sully, Million Dollar Baby, the paired Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, etc., etc. Within his wheelhouse Eastwood has turned out to be a pretty good filmmaker—better than Howard. Juror #2 was originally intended as a direct-to-streaming release, which might have been more appropriate given how much it relies on a coincidence that makes any reasonable person howl. Nicholas Hoult (the silvery-lipped Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and the boy in About a Boy) plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic whose wife is third-trimester of a high-risk pregnancy after previous miscarriages. He’s called to jury duty on a case where (gasp!) he and not the man on trial turns out to be the wanton vehicular homicider in question. Oh such dilemma. I mean, it’s set in a small town in Georgia, Ocilla, so sure, it’s possible. But it’s so constantly hard to believe. Screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams is really pushing it here and Eastwood is too for accepting this ridiculous premise as remotely plausible. Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Hereditary, also with Hoult in About a Boy) plays it with her usual skill as the prosecutor who bears one of my favorite character names of all time, Faith Killebrew, which puts me in mind of the Minnesota Twins. J.K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland pile on with additional star power. Simmons is good in the sour hangdog way he usually is. Sutherland, as a semi-corrupt and somewhat unbelievable AA sponsor, is remarkably bad, reminding us that his usual signal of intensity, hoarse whispering, has been failing him for a while now. Is Juror #2 dramatic and engaging? Sure, I guess so. I mean, I watched the whole thing even while carping to myself about plot points. Eastwood could have picked worse ways to do a swan song, if that’s what this is. But that’s an insight that could well appear in the dictionary definition of “damning with faint praise.”

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.

Unforgiven (1992)

USA, 131 minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Photography: Jack N. Green
Music: Lennie Niehaus
Editor: Joel Cox
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Saul Rubinek, Frances Fisher, Anna Thomson, David Mucci, Rob Campbell, Anthony James

Director Clint Eastwood so thoroughly gulled me with this self-serious and anachronistic meditation on women's issues and gun violence transposed to the 19th-century American frontier (1880 Wyoming, to be specific) that I took away a number of enduring misperceptions from it, chief among them that Eastwood embraced liberal/progressive values. It's fair enough to say I like Unforgiven in the same way and for much the same reasons that I like the Star Trek franchise, particularly The Next Generation—for the earnest way it supplants toxic old myths and replaces them with new and convincing models (to me, the eternal political naïf and social optimist). As propaganda, one might say, putting a less pleasant spin on it. It wasn't until the last presidential election cycle that I finally said something that caused a friend to disabuse me of my sense of Eastwood (imagine if it had been this year when he turned up talking to an empty chair in prime time—how embarrassing for me!).

Twenty years on, it's readily apparent that Unforgiven is more a picture about 1992 than 1880—or perhaps, more abstractly, about making Westerns in 1992 rather than 1939. The self-seriousness is written into practically every line and gesture. For all the sturdy structure and fine pacing and confidence of the storytelling, the two sets of values are so jarring in opposition to one another and our expectations—the look and feel of the rugged West where a man is a man vs. "c'mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another right now," etc.—that it often comes across as stilted and affected. Yet I have seen Unforgiven many times and it rarely fails to work on me.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

#18: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Until the legions of imitators came along in Quentin Tarantino's wake, I'm not sure anyone ever made movies the way Sergio Leone did. Now it sometimes seems like everyone does, but the original remains the best. His forte was visuals, cunningly edited—giant Cinemascope images of vast empty landscapes alternating with close-ups of craggy faces, equally vast and empty, and as imposing as mountains. Dialogue is at a minimum; long sections could probably get away with intertitles. But he was no throwback to silent movies, as his sound designs are integral to his storytelling, whether it's a windmill in need of oil, the whining echoes of gunfire, or the fly buzzing that Emily Dickinson knew. His collaborations with composer Ennio Morricone—particularly in Once Upon a Time in the West, where each of four characters arrive with individualized musical themes, which interact and develop as they do—are uniquely memorable and perhaps his single greatest achievement.

In fact, it was the theme song that drew me in the first place to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which seems to be the one I return to most. As a junior high kid I was lost in the glacial pace of this nearly three-hour picture (the back end of a trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), but my interest picked up considerably whenever the theme started playing again. The scene that's most striking to me now (not available that I could find on YouTube) involves a group of POWs ordered to play music to mask the sounds of torture. The song they play, "La historia de un soldado," is immeasurably sad, and even as they play it they are immeasurably sad too. The way it's staged and cut is absurd and moving all at once, a trick Leone manages to play over and over again in his pictures.

Grace Is Gone (2007)

 

USA, 85 minutes
Director/writer: James C. Strouse 

Photography: Jean-Louis Bompoint

Music: Clint Eastwood
Cast: John Cusack, Shélan O'Keefe, Gracie Bednarczyk, Alessandro Nivola

Another movie on the fallout from George W. Bush's war on Iraq—seems like I watched a lot of them last year (behind as usual). This one is a kind of road move through the looking glass. John Cusack's Stanley Phillips, an ex-military man now a retail sales manager for a big box outlet in suburban Minnesota, learns that his wife, also in the service but still on active duty, has died in Iraq. Not yet ready to tell his two girls, 12 and 8, he simply packs them up, leaves his job behind, and sets out on a family sojourn to a Florida amusement park favored by the youngest daughter. The whole thing skirts the edges of disturbing behavior with a sure and sensitive touch in terms of Cusack's performance; and director/screenwriter Strouse's tone holds hushed and controlled, never hysterical. You're never really sure if the obviously stand-up Phillips is hanging on through the grief or has lost it entirely, as he makes calls from pay phones along the way and leaves messages for his wife on their home answering machine, whose greeting is still her, and continues to delay before finally finding the way to tell the news to his daughters. It's a heartbreaker by definition and the relief is tremendous and palpable. By the closing scenes I suddenly started to notice how invested I had become in seeing the right things happen. A nicely done production, even if the topic now seems suddenly dated and a little tired out—it isn't really.