"Prejudice always obscures the truth."

Rating: 10/10 (26 April 2008)

It seems that the message of 12 Angry Men (above) comes across as the film's only weakness. It starts with the very close of a trial that we never see and convenes immediately into the jury room, where we spend the rest of the movie. It seems an open and shut case, and by a show of hands, there are 11 jury members convinced that the defendant is guilty, and a single man who believes not that he is NOT guilty just that there is a CHANCE that he's not guilty.
The film's weakness comes in because it seems that every single person who believes the kid is guilty ultimately reveals that they have some kind of personal vendetta and want to secure a conviction regardless of the sureness of the truth. The problem here is that people who believe in guilty are bad guys (and they rarely let you forget this, as one or two of them increasingly show off as brutish jerks, while the calm, endlessly likable Henry Fonda heads up the good guy side. Maybe the movie should have been called 11 Angry Men instead.
There is also a certain level of ham-handedness involved in the initial presentation of how little the case means to most of the jurors. The story is about how important such legal cases are, because the decision that they make in that room will change someone's life forever, and it is absolutely imperative that they make the right decision. But at the beginning, all of the jurors have their minds somewhere else. They're talking about sports or their jobs or some other casual subject, and it takes one brave juror to stand up to the rest and get them to pay attention and think about what they are about to do.
Sidney Lumet, in his book Making Movies, gives us invaluable insight into his goals and experience making 12 Angry Men, including the positioning of the camera (watch for the appearance of the ceiling late in the film as the tension mounts) and his brilliant use of lighting. Late in the movie, as the jurors remain in the room until darkness falls outside, it is so gradual and so cleverly done that we don't even realize the movie is getting darker and darker until they flip the lights on, and when they do, it's not just the room that is lighting up.
The performances themselves have not aged well, but it is a brilliant analysis of some facts that seemed to so obviously point to one foregone conclusion, although I have to say that the film's other weakness is that a lot of the facts that they re-analyze (or analyze for the first time) should have been ridiculously obvious in the original courtroom trial. The jurors question for the first time, for example, the eyesight of the case's key eyewitness, who claims to have seen the murder take place at night and through the windows of a passing elevated train. I should hope that such a situation would have been scrutinized more closely by even the most inexperienced defense attorney, but maybe that person was secretly hoping for a conviction, too.
At any rate, the film is a brilliant achievement, given that it is so engaging even though it literally never leaves the room. It reminds us of the importance of certainty in trials, even when the result seems completely obvious. The end of the movie is perfect, as there is only one way that it could really end (and I don't mean the jury's final decision), and yet it is not predictable. This is one of Lumet's most glowing achievements.