THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – SHOULD NOT BE LOST
We knew it at least from The man of the high plains (1973), his second feature film as a director, Clint Eastwood is the quintessential comeback man. From among the shadows of classic cinema, of a young man with all eternity gone, and even his own death, constantly foreshadowed. Author at the age of 94 of a now monumental work, the impassive ghost delivers with Jury #2, As is usually the case, a film of excellent quality, in which his body is absent this time but where his spirit persists. Such is the current situation in Hollywood, that the slightest Clint Eastwood film can, through his understanding of the complexity that fiction requires, have the effect of a Critique of pure reason.
This is a test film combined with a thriller. Lived, as they say, from the subjective experience of “Jury number 2”Justin Kemp, a tall, handsome boy who looks a bit like a young Clint Eastwood (English actor Nicholas Hoult plays him), a good and loyal husband to a wife about to give birth to their first child. The fact that he is appointed juror in a homicide case implicitly opens up the existence of another couple of approximately the same age, who turns out to be his infernal counterpoint. In fact, his body has just been found lifeless on the side of a road. As for him, a well-known drug trafficker and brute (Gabriel Basso, from the series The night agent), is suspected of having killed her after leaving a bar where, drunk, they broke up publicly.
The first, in the company of his fellow jurors, will be led to judge the innocence or guilt of the second, overwhelmed by everything. Including the implacable gaze of a deputy prosecutor (Toni Collette, with all the necessary arrogance) in the midst of a campaign to ascend to the upper echelon, increasingly willing to close the case without problems with what she has in her hands. The film really binds itself, never to let go, with Kemp’s first “visions.” Like Clint Eastwood, the young man suffers from reminiscences. Haunted by the past. For his own past, in this case.
messed up world
In small touches, as visions take over him during the trial, the story of a couple less sunny, less solid than it might have seemed. Two children to cry. The terrible drinking experience for Kemp. Self-help groups. The relapse of an evening in the same bar where the other couple breaks up. The girl who runs out of the bar chased by her lover. The car we take after them at night and in torrential rain to return home. The violent impact of an unidentified body against the hood. Let the reader be assured that we have not betrayed anything here that could not be betrayed. These revelations appear early enough in the film that the hypothesis of Kemp’s guilt, and therefore that of the innocence of the man we are trying to judge, circumscribes the real terrain in which this film will take place.
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