A film so good, you'll feel like you've gained insight into life and humanity

Rating: 10/10 (17 May 2016)

12 Angry Men is a film that's so good and so powerful that, as the credits roll, you actually feel like you've gained a deeper understanding of humanity, our justice system, and life in general. I mean it. It's really that good.
Twelve jurors of varying ages, personalities, cultural backgrounds and social standings enter a deliberation room to determine the guilt or innocence of a troubled teenage boy accused of murdering his father. It's quite a simple premise – a jury's deliberation – one that occurs daily all over the United States. But the film manages to wring every last drop of tension, drama, and social commentary from this commonplace scenario that it's impossible not to viscerally experience the true weight and implications of such a task – to search for the truth in a case of life and death.
First things first: let's just appreciate how entertaining 12 Angry Men is. This is a film that takes place entirely in a single room, and tells its story completely through dialogue. And yet, it manages to be significantly more absorbing and enthralling than your average film with dozens of different locations and set pieces. The dialogue is so well-written and the characters so well-realized (and acted) that you become completely swept up in the proceedings. The pacing is also pitch perfect. The film rises naturally to a few emotional climaxes and confrontations, which are punctuated by quieter moments as the characters (and we as the audience) catch our breaths and process what has developed. And for a film that takes place entirely in such a confined space, there are a pretty incredible number of interestingly-composed sequences and long takes as the camera maneuvers from character to character and the drama unfolds.
So yes, 12 Angry Men is a superbly entertaining film that absolutely flies by over the course of its brief hour-and-a-half running time. But it's also so much more than that. It's a film about "truth": its elusiveness, malleability, and vulnerability to the subjectivity of the human mind. Yes, there is a single objective truth to this, and likewise any real-life case; but the jurors don't know it, and neither do we. The objective truth isn't the point. The point is the impressionability of the "truth" – how it morphs in the minds of the characters (and in ours) over the course of the film, and how significantly it can be informed by our emotions, past experiences, memory (and its limitations), prejudices, and a myriad of other factors. The film is able to crystallize both the beauty and the folly of our judicial system. The beauty, as Henry Fonda's character points out, is that the scales are heavily tipped in favor of the innocent, that no man can be found guilty unless that guilt is beyond any reasonable doubt. The folly? The subjectivity of reasonable doubt, and the unavoidable reliance on a human jury who are influenced by all of the aforementioned factors.
But ultimately, 12 Angry Man a film about us – people. Each juror in the film has a unique personality, temperament, and background which informs his opinion and motivates the role he plays in the story. Every juror gets his time to shine and the result is an ensemble that feels both diverse and extremely well- balanced.
The strength of the characters in the film and the way they play off of one another is key to perhaps its most important theme: the danger of assumption, and the ease and quickness with which we judge one another. We watch as the jurors expose their biases and prejudices through their assumptions and judgments of the defendant, as well as one another. But even beyond that, the true brilliance of the film is that it subtly provokes the exact same snap-judgments from us as we watch. It's extremely easy to start to view the more critical jurors as the "good guys" and the dissenting, guilty-proponent jurors as the "bad guys." To invoke a psychiatric concept, we engage in splitting – seeing some of the jurors as "all good" and others as "all bad." We automatically begin to judge the seemingly more prejudiced and willful jurors, confining them to a box of our construction without knowing barely anything about them.
But in its revealing final moments, the film snaps us back and urges us to look beneath the surface of those who we judge and ask an important question: why? Why does one juror spew prejudice and anger while another sits silently? What drives them to act in the way that they do? No one is born prejudiced, bigoted or racist. These are things we learn and which become incorporated into our personalities often through no fault of our own. The angry, prejudiced juror isn't inherently "all bad," but simply reacts in a way that is informed by his accumulated life experience (much of which is subconscious). Of course, that doesn't mean that people can't and shouldn't be held accountable for their negative attributes and beliefs – we can always introspect and take action to improve our worst qualities. But that isn't the point. The film simply asserts that we should strive to understand before we judge, as understanding and empathy fosters connection where judgment simply divides. As Juror #3 – who we've likely judged and grown to despise throughout the film – weeps over the torn photograph of himself and his estranged son at the conclusion of the film, the message couldn't be clearer.
12 Angry Men is a masterpiece. It is a film that marvelously succeeds on all the facets that every great film should. It's fabulously entertaining and engrossing, fantastically shot and acted, perfectly paced, and extremely thought-provoking. An undeniable classic whose themes will never lose their relevance.