Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a good guy: thoughtful, sincere, honest. He and his wife, Ally (Zoey Deutch), are expecting their first child, he has four years of hard-won sobriety under his belt and he works a humble—but, we gather, fulfilling—job as a magazine writer. Even when he’s summoned for jury duty, he tells the truth instead of inventing an outrageous excuse. He is selected for the trial of James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood), on a rainy night the previous fall. But as the details of the case are revealed, Justin comes to a horrifying realization: It’s very likely that he unknowingly killed Kendall in a hit-and-run.
With his history of DUIs, it’s likely that he would receive the maximum sentence for vehicular manslaughter—30 years to life—if he comes forward. Meanwhile, Sythe’s conviction seems all but assured: The prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), built a strong case and is counting on a win to give her a boost in the upcoming district attorney election. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Justin to simply do nothing. Easy, if he didn’t have a conscience.
“Juror #2” (2024), directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Jonathan Abrams, presents a good person in an impossible moral quandary. Does he stay silent and let Sythe—an imperfect man, but likely innocent—spend the rest of his life in prison? Or does he confess, destroying his own life and leaving his unborn child fatherless? In Sythe, Justin sees a mirror of his own journey to redemption: his whole life was changed by a second chance; doesn’t this man deserve the same? On the other hand, it’s Justin’s past that will damn him if he comes forward: He wasn’t driving drunk that night, but would any jury believe him? A court of law, with its carefully defined rules and objective legal principles, has no room for that sort of human ambiguity.
That ambiguity is at the film’s heart. The cast—through the rich, specific humanity of their performances—never lets you escape to a safe, philosophical distance. Particular credit goes to Basso and Deutch as the two people who stand to be harmed most by Justin’s choice, and the heart wrenching meta-casting of Eastwood’s own daughter as the victim.
This latter stage of Eastwood’s career has largely focused on the complicated nature of heroism in American society, with films like “American Sniper” (2014), “Sully” (2016) and “Richard Jewell” (2019). In “Juror #2,” he broadens the scope to question what justice means in an imperfect world. How do you act morally when every outcome leads to suffering? Ideally, individual conscience and the larger mechanisms of law would always work in concert; but what happens when they are at odds? Midway through the film, Sythe’s public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), toasts the justice system: “It ain’t perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got.” Maybe he’s right, but that would be cold comfort to someone in Justin (or Sythe’s) position, caught in a crack in the system’s facade.
While Eastwood is not a Catholic, his film echoes an essential part of Catholic moral teaching: the primacy of conscience. We live according to set moral principles, but in the end each person must follow their internal compass in deciding what is right or wrong. “For man has in his heart a law written by God,” the council fathers of Vatican II wrote in “Gaudium et spes.” “[T]o obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths.” This is not to say that morality is relative. The church stresses the importance of a “well-formed conscience” in order to hear the genuine voice of God amid the noise of ego and self-interest. But with that caveat, the urgings of one’s conscience must be obeyed above all other laws.
We speak of conscience in lofty terms, but “Juror #2” confronts us with an uncomfortable reality: following your conscience often comes at great personal cost. The question Justin faces—and that we all face, as we try to do good in an imperfect world—is if it’s a cost he is willing to pay.
“Juror #2” is streaming on Max.
