The last decade of Clint Eastwood movies has been defined by a certain level of unadorned technical sturdiness in service of ambivalent yet engaged depictions of attempts at individual heroism within flawed American institutions (military/policing, the media, the justice system); so honestly a courtroom-drama-as-morality-play-thriller may have just been the perfect match of maker and material the man has had during this stretch of his career. In terms of what he’s doing here, the closest companion piece is probably the reckoning with the systemic process by which truth is ignored due to perceived image in Richard Jewell, but unshackling similar considerations of the casual momentum towards injustice from the demands of a conventional awards season biopic, Eastwood has found himself able to apply many of the same old-fashioned Hollywood tools to a more extreme situation and form of psychological torment.

Taking what feels like an airport paperback premise involving a flawed, former alcoholic journalist called into mundane jury duty only to find himself due to a series delightfully preposterous events in an intense moral conflict of interest as the lone Not Guilty voice in a murder trial because he knows himself to be the real (accidental) killer, and exploiting his soulfully guilt-ridden attempt to convince the other jurors of the man’s innocence (without implicating himself and ruining the new life he’s built) for the type of intelligently crafted and psychologically considered philosophical courtroom thrills of 12 Angry Men. The most fascinating thing about it is that for most of its runtime it behaves like exactly the movie you expect of it based on that point of reference: going from a full trial rundown of what appears to be an open-and-shut case (interestingly cut not like a typical back-and-forth argument between lawyers, but one overwhelming wave of fatalistic cross-cutting inevitability) followed by the entertaining deliberations of a series of stock jury archetypes each carrying their own prejudiced assumptions; the true crime podcast lady got some big laughs. Only breaking occasionally to accumulate hints that the seasoned public defender has finally found a client he truly believes is innocent and his ambitious DA drinking buddy (Messina and Collette have great chemistry in these scenes) who is clearly more attentive to how this will affect her election chances than the minutia of getting her case “right”, as well as the necessary subjective Rashomon flashbacks that set-up the biased closeness to with which our protagonist is familiar with the objective truth everyone else is concealed from.

And in fairness, Eastwood and his supporting cast (MVP: J.K. Simmons as the retired detective who is punished for going Columbo Mode and Kiefer Sutherland as the realist lawyer/AA sponsor confidant) are very good at navigating these suspenseful accumulations of twists and coincidences that are a staple of the genre and he's not above satisfyingly hitting familiar beats, but what made this movie special in my eyes was when it subtly subverted them and forced itself to really sit with the thornier more uncomfortable shades of its scripted scenario, and the ambitious thematic concerns it poses about concealed self-interest and subjective perception as everyday tools of blurring or outright ignoring fact. That conflict is played out beautifully on the face of Nicolas Hoult (arguably as good here as he was in Fury Road), whose teary-eyed deer-caught-in-headlights stupor is the perfect register in which to play this tumultuous internal melodrama he needs to hide from everyone around him as he tries to resist all the inherent flaws to this process that are only being crystalized to him for reasons he's unable to explain to the others without martyring himself and his family. A contradiction so deeply ingrained in his perspective that by the time you can feel the film building to its classical breaking point where someone in an Old Hollywood movie would stand up and make a rousing speech to put these wrongs right, it instead deliberately deflates to a much quieter and more existential place.

Maybe it should've been obvious that the man who at one point made Unforgiven wouldn't go in for grandstanding genre catharsis, however I still found myself kind of blindsided by the genuinely bleak and troublingly unresolved cut-to-black that plays like the inverse of Gyllenhaal starring into the eyes of the Arthur Leigh Allen at the end of Zodiac, where two characters are briefly connected by the shared knowledge of a truth they know they can't say out loud. Fincher in that movie found a way to use that moment to end on a note that despite the soul-sucking levels of obsession depicted suggested even if this senseless evil will never be served a traditional form of courtroom justice, maybe ordinary people putting in the work and grinding away can locate some sort of complex internal sense of closure... Here we are instead presented with how an evil decision can be logically rationalized when a system inherently asks ordinary people be disinterested or indifferent and grinds down the ones who resist it, hitting a final note that suggests the gnawing psychological and moral weight we will be (consciously or unconsciously) burdened with for every waking moment we are made self-aware of not just the fact that there are flaws in these collective processes we have all agreed to ignore (which we can dissociate ourselves from or at least argue are out of our control) but how easily they can also bend and break our personal internal clock without us even realizing it.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.