Ryan's Journal

Henry Fonda character's a bit too perfect, but Lee J. Cobb hits all the right notes as the aggressively pained Juror #3. It's hard to believe this is Sidney Lumet's first film - sure, the shots and lighting he chooses are a little overdramatic in some places, yet the performances he elicits, in a sparse setting of twelve men in one room (minus bookends and a brief bathroom break) for an hour and a half, no less, is nothing short of amazing.

To be sure, it's the truth of the film that makes it; the speechmaking, prettied up for Hollywood, still comes from the pen of somebody who has paid careful attention to people, to the way we arrive at conclusions based on everything except "the facts." Fonda's Juror #8 doesn't set about his task by convincing his fellow jurymen that he's right or that they're wrong - he's finding out about them as individuals, drawing out the best parts and thoughts from the people of integrity and bringing to the fore the internal pains and tortures of the broken.

What a paean to postmodernity - the system of determining guilt in this country, with its hallowed laws and due process, its binary view of guilt and innocence, is neatly and simply subverted to the relationships between twelve overheated, restless, and angry men. And not just with each other, but with themselves - the foreman and his leadership insecurities, Juror #10 and his eugenics, Juror #7 and his shallowness.

Not only is the system subject to our petty human differences, Juror #8, our hero, goes beyond the story the system tells us to examine the system itself - what did the prosecutor leave out, what did the defense fail to do? Can the story the authorities give us be right - or must we think about it on our own? Are we so much better than the defendant, and do we put so much trust in the witnesses that we won't put it all through a little bit of thought? His peers come away with, one might hope, an improved ability to see whole pictures.

"Not guilty," quietly sobs the juror last to relent. As the twelve disperse, we're left the better for having watched them sweat and quarrel - as we always can be in the face of conflict.

Yes, you do have to see this one. It's only fifty years old.

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