Juror #2

Clint Eastwood's latest -- and possibly last? -- film got dumped with barely any fanfare, but it's a probing drama that sifts through moral ambiguities without enforcing any didactic conclusions.

Clint Eastwood the filmmaker has long had a habit of dropping his movies into theaters without much fanfare. “Million Dollar Baby” arrived in cinemas after most critic groups and award prognosticators had already announced their “best of” lists, and went on to clean up at the Oscars and box office.

Truthfully, the last decade has been Eastwood’s weakest as a filmmaker, with “Jersey Boys” and “The 15:17 to Paris” borderline dreadful, and even increasingly rare standouts like “Sully” and “Richard Jewell” not approaching the level of his heyday, critically or commercially.

Even by this standard, though, I’m not sure what to make of the release for “Juror #2.” It’s heavily rumored to be Eastwood’s last film, and at age 94 it’s not like it would be surprising for him to hang up his spurs. It debuted at the American Film Institute, as has been Eastwood’s habit, and then got dumped into a few dozen theaters in only the largest markets. It’s actually playing in more theaters in England, around 300, than here in the States.

Warner Bros. is said to be planning to give it a national release only on its Max streaming network, but with no date attached so far. I was able to watch it as part of awards consideration screeners afforded to broadcast critics, and since the studio hasn’t so much as uttered a whisper of guidance (and I already see more than a hundred reviews linked on Rotten Tomatoes) I’m going to offer my thoughts for whenever it does become available in whatever form to see.

It’s definitely not among Eastwood’s best, but it is a probing legal drama that I appreciated for its embrace of moral ambiguity. Written by Jonathan A. Abrams, his first produced screenplay, it sifts through complex questions of guilt and intention without enforcing any didactic conclusions on the audience.

The plot is sort of the opposite of the traditional Alfred Hitchcock paradigm: an innocent man being chased and persecuted for a crime he didn’t commit, and he spends the movie trying to prove it to everybody else.

Here, Nicholas Hoult plays a good man who discovers that he did something terrible without evening knowing it at the time, and he holds the fate of another man accused of that deed in his hands. He could remain silent and live out the rest of his life without fear of punishment, or speak up and take full responsibility for his unintentional actions, with a high probability of ruining his own life.

Without giving anything away, he chooses neither of these paths. “Juror #2” is the story of a man trying to chart a dubious middle way, exploring if he will succeed at it and especially if he can live with the outcome.

Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a young lifestyle magazine writer in Savannah, Ga. He is about to welcome his first child with his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), after previous heartbreaking pregnancies. He doesn’t want to serve when he receives a jury summons, but finds himself empaneled in a murder case of an abusive jerk, James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), who allegedly killed his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood), beating her and throwing her off a bridge near a honky-tonk bar a year ago.

The prosecutor on the case, Faith Killebrew, is played by the always-excellent Toni Collette, a smart and ambitious lawyer who is also running to be district attorney. She knows blowing this case will probably mean her defeat. Her frequent opponent, frenemy and drinking partner is Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), who understands his role to publicly defend the worst creeps but insists this client is innocent.

Eastwood and Abrams use an interesting technique I’ve never seen before in a courtroom drama: intercutting between the two attorneys’ questions of witnesses and statements to the jury, so their pronouncements are joined within the same flow. It enforces the idea that these are equals and advocates who are striving to see justice done, and not partisan actors simply working for their own gain. It’s so simple, and yet I can’t recall another film that does this.

Very early in the proceedings, Justin realizes that James didn’t kill Kendall — because he did.

In flashbacks, we return to the night of her death, Oct. 25 — which we’ll learn is notable for another reason — and see that Justin himself was at the same bar as the couple, who were typically having a spat that turned violent. A recovering alcoholic, he went in there to get a drink but wound up leaving before imbibing. In a heavy downpour, he hit something with his car, looked around but didn’t find anything, and figured from the signs marking it as a deer crossing that’s exactly what happened.

Justin had his Toyota fixed, and forgot about it.

Normally in a movie conundrum like this, the protagonist doesn’t say anything to anyone and just lets the weight of what happened slowly crush them. Here, Justin immediately does the thing a real person would: he talks to a lawyer. In this case, also his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, played by Kiefer Sutherland. He explains to Justin that given his previous DUI conviction and unconvincing story about going into a bar but not drinking, he’d almost certainly face significant jail time.

So Justin sets about to subtly sabotage the jury deliberations. In the finest tradition of “12 Angry Men” and other courtroom cases, he is the only not guilty vote at first, and gradually works to swing the others over to their side.

The jury is an eclectic mix of people of various backgrounds and opinions; some come to the fore and others stay in the background. J.K. Simmons is the most notable as the crusty owner of a flower shop, who seems to be way more familiar with crime-and-punishment affairs than a guy who sells roses should.

Leslie Bibb is the earnest housewife forewoman; Adrienne C. Moore is a bus driver who just wants to get jury duty over with so she can get back to her kids; Cedric Yarbrough is a community advocate with a chip on his shoulder; Zele Avradopoulos is the alternate jury member who leans on her true-crime obsession; Jason Coviello is a divorced dad, vaguely scary; Rebecca Koon is an elderly lady whose prim disposition hides a well-worn toughness.

Amy Aquino also shines as the all-business judge, carefully directing traffic in court and committed to keeping things fair and focused on the facts.

Probably the weakest thing about the movie is the character of Justin, as he’s written and as played by Hoult. It’s a very passive role, mostly watching and reacting, and that requires a bright light of interior presence to help keep the audience engaged with the main character and tied to what’s churning around inside his head and heart. Rather than a window into his soul, I encountered mostly drawn shades.

The doings in the courtroom and, later, the jury room more than carry the day, though, and it’s hard to argue that “Juror #2” is anything less than a gripping courtroom drama, even if the psychology of the protagonist isn’t as explored as deeply as I’d like.

The best thing about the film is the question it poses, but doesn’t answer: what would you do in such circumstances? The woman’s death was a pure accident for which no one deserves blame, and yet two men’s lives hang in the balance — one sitting at the defendant’s table, the other a few feet away in the jury box.

It’s a horrifying prospect, encapsulating a solid movie that deserved a better rollout.