Clint Eastwood
Giurato numero 2

In the garden of good and evil that Clint Eastwood has staged over the last fifty years and more, the roles in the play - the good guys and the bad guys - are not what they seem, not what fate and, above all, the script of the media and federal prosecutors have reserved.

Justice and truth are purely theoretical, hypothetical, almost metaphysical concepts. Categories of the spirit, within that gigantic chaos that civilization tries to regulate through law.
Life, which slips away allowing you to barely notice this passage when it’s too late, is made of unforeseeable events, wild variables confused in the cold and rainy nights.
The Justice of the courts - represented by the Roman deity Iustitia, recurrent in the film - can only deceive in returning dignity to death and sense to events, but indeed, there are too many elements of this gigantic chaos. Too many to be put in order according to a coherent and definitive scheme.

The Manichean categories are the antithesis of Eastwood’s study of the complexity of human affairs.
Eastwood’s cinema is a humanistic monument. The Eastwoodian humanism embraces the thousand facets of the soul of individual people.

All his work teaches that behind what appears to be simple, too much else is hidden. It was the case in Mystic River, where Dave Boyle returned home wounded and bleeding the same night of the murder of the nineteen-year-old daughter of his former friend and former gangster Jimmy Murkum. But the truth was far from what the latter decreed.
There was something else behind it, something too banal to be accepted, and at the same time deeper than a river.
And so, even in Juror Number 2, the truth is not found along the path of apparent logic.

If in the Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall one had to choose which truth to believe, in Juror Number 2 the choice is even more difficult, because it leads to painful ethical and moral implications, with which to live for the rest of one’s life. And this is, therefore, the core: the individual choice.
In Eastwood’s vision, every individual can alone influence the destiny of a few or even millions of others, consciously or not. Like Hitler’s mother who ultimately chose not to have an abortion.
His is the individualism of a man belonging to an enlightened right, a divine right, which is inside us, in sleep, as Pasolini defined it. And for this reason not even definable by simplistic traditional binary political oppositions.

It is impressive the clarity with which Eastwood, even today, at 94 years old, manages to reflect on man and his social forms.
He has repeatedly scrutinized America in its contradictions, in its deep darkness.
Juror Number 2 seems reminiscent of Sidney Lumet’s historical lesson in 12 Angry Men, yet it is much more, it takes unexpected and unanticipated directions, up to an open and doubt-filled ending.
Eastwood, like all the greatest artists, asks the questions without providing the answers, shuns shortcuts and moralism.

Once again, he completes a masterful and extraordinary work. Yet another.
Within the extensive filmography of the director of Unforgiven, Juror Number 2 stands just below the category of absolute masterpieces and boasts a colossal Nicholas Hoult as the protagonist, at his most important performance so far in a career that began as a child. When, alongside Toni Collette, he appeared in the gem About a Boy. Toni Collette whom he now meets again after twenty-two years.

Who knows if this performance might earn Hoult an Oscar.

With Cry Macho, an extremely and inexplicably underrated film, Eastwood bade farewell to acting, and with Juror Number 2 he might have done so with cinema.
If this is the case, it will have been with a marvelous film, one of the best of this year.
Forever, thank you immensely Clint.