Downbeat endings are a Clint Eastwood speciality. The good guys don’t always win in his movies. When they do, it’s usually with an act of sacrifice that leaves them six feet under or too far gone. Regret, heartbreak, uncertainty, moral ruin — these are the parting notes the nonagenarian star turned director so often plays. Juror #2, Eastwood’s latest drama (and, given his age, possibly his last), seems for a while to be building toward a characteristically bleak punctuation, yet another classic Clint downer of a dénouement. But then comes the final scene, a tense, wordless exchange that alters the film’s trajectory at the last second, like a surprise witness called to the stand in the 11th hour of a murder trial. Make no mistake, this is a downbeat ending, too. But it’s also, in another sense, kind of … hopeful.
That’s not a word you’d use to describe many Eastwood movies — or, for that matter, the climax of Juror #2, which arrives a few minutes earlier. Though the plot of this Grisham-esque legal thriller revolves around a man accused of killing his girlfriend, the dramatic culmination of the film happens not at the bench in the courtroom but on a bench outside of the courthouse. It’s here that the juror of the title, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), has a calm but loaded conversation with prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) after the defendant is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Faith has belatedly realized what Justin has been sweatily concealing the whole trial: that he hit something on the road the night the victim died, and hence may have just deliberated on a crime he actually committed.
Over the course of this brief conversation, Justin pleads his own case. The defendant may be innocent of this crime, he argues, but he’s not an innocent man. He has a history of violence and could hurt someone in the future if given the chance. Would it be justice for Justin to go to prison for a crime he didn’t even know he committed? And what about the greater good Faith could do if elected district attorney? Her election bid will surely be over the minute the truth about the case comes to light. There’s a certain seductive logic to the argument Hoult’s anguished protagonist makes for letting someone take the fall for his mistake. It’s certainly alluring to the lawyer — and maybe to an audience sympathetic to the movie’s central moral dilemma.
Of course, Justin’s rationalizations are just a tortured attempt to avoid accountability — to skirt legal consequences and assuage his own guilty conscience. He’s been trying, throughout Juror #2, to thread the impossible needle of preventing a wrongful conviction without taking any responsibility. By the time he’s on that bench, hashing out what he’s done, it’s clear to the character and the viewer that justice in this case was a zero-sum game. Justin isn’t just appealing to Faith’s self-interest. He’s using intellectual gymnastics to justify his own. And there’s a bitter irony to his reasoning that the convicted deserves to go down for something he didn’t do: Justin, who has a DUI on his record but wasn’t drunk the night he hit what he thought was a deer on the side of the road, would be condemned by the same logic.
By tacitly accepting this miscarriage of justice, Faith makes a devil’s bargain. Here, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams seem to be setting up a truly pessimistic upshot: Life goes on for Justin, Faith buries the truth (and her own misgivings) in pursuit of her political ambitions, and a man spends the rest of his life behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.
But then comes the final scene, when Justin’s domestic bliss is interrupted by a knock on the door. It’s Faith on the other side. Eastwood leaves what happens next entirely to implication, trusting the audience to read between the lines of the characters’ silent reunion in the doorway. The point of the visit comes through loud and clear without words: No, Faith can’t accept the terms of their agreement. She has to come clean, regardless of the damage it will do to her career. Justice will be served. Conceptually, the prior Eastwood ending it most resembles is Mystic River’s, which similarly involved one character saying to another, sans dialogue, “This isn’t over.”
The system is often the enemy in Eastwood’s movies. It leaves soldiers out to dry in American Sniper and Flags of Our Fathers. It protects the privileged at the expense of the vulnerable, as in Absolute Power. The media, the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement — by this screen legend’s usual estimation, these are potentially noble, valuable institutions corrupted from within. Even when his characters triumph over the odds or the obstacles in the end, it usually comes at a price. The title character of his recent Richard Jewell is eventually exonerated … but only after his reputation is dragged through the mud by the press and the FBI. Same goes for the Sully of Sully, a heroically quick-thinking pilot forced to essentially endure a tribunal for the decision that saved his passengers. And how many Eastwood movies have ended with their protagonists forced to circumvent the forces of authority to achieve justice?
In Juror #2, making the righteous moral decision has consequences, just as it has for the various lone wolves Eastwood has played, on and off, for 70 years. What’s different about this Eastwood film is that for once, it’s not an outsider who rights the wrongs but a cog of the system — a prosecutor who eventually concludes that her own success isn’t worth the trade-off of sacrificing a man’s freedom or compromising the integrity of the law. You could call this a happy ending of sorts. Not for Justin, of course — he won’t be getting away with what he’s done. And not necessarily for Faith, whose act of Eastwoodian sacrifice is to torpedo her professional future in pursuit of justice and to accept a loss in that zero-sum game. But maybe a happy ending for the American judiciary. (Compare it to the end of Eastwood’s True Crime, where an innocent man is saved from lethal injection only because a crusading reporter defies his bosses to uncover the truth.)
For most of its run time, Juror #2 seems to be arriving at the conclusion that our justice system is critically vulnerable to the personal motives of its practitioners. It offers a vision of an America ruled, and maybe ruined, by self-interest. Until the last scene, that is. Here, a glimmer of optimism at last appears via one lawyer’s virtuous rejection of self-interest. Not for nothing, perhaps, is she named Faith. By ending with the implication that she’ll do the right thing — that she’ll pursue justice no matter the cost — Eastwood expresses a measure of hope for a system that’s only as good as the people entrusted to uphold its principles. What an oddly inspiring note on which to end the movie, and maybe to end a whole career of spirit-dampening morality tales.