Riveting

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2006)

This is a fine film with a terrific cast. Its Spartan set serves to draw the viewer into the intensity that churns throughout the deliberations of the twelve men constitute the jury in a criminal case. It is hard to imagine a simpler story line: the twelve person jury has retired to deliberate the fate of a young man charged with murdering his father. One of the number (Henry Fonda) votes "not guilty" in the first vote. The other 11 jurors, more or less convinced that they are discussing an "open and shut" case, immediately set out to prove him wrong. Instead, one expresses doubts about the evidence and proceeds to convince the other jurors, one by one, of the flaws in the evidence and the existence of a reasonable doubt as to the guilt. Nearly all of the action takes place in the jury room, or in the restroom adjacent to it. There is no recreation of the crime other than those portions of the evidence "acted out" by the jurors in the course of their deliberations. This film does not emphasize the police work, or the work of the lawyers in the trial, or of investigators, or forensic evidence. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the drama of twelve jurors trying to decide what is the right thing to do in the case. Each in turn reveals a bias or flaw in his logic that has caused him to view the evidence in a particular way. In the end, each is confronted to identify his blind spot and acknowledge that it is that blind spot that caused him to think the defendant guilty rather than a careful examination of the evidence. One just wants to get to the Yankees game, one believes if an immigrant is charged with a crime he has to be guilty, and so forth. There are two dramatic moments that stand out above the rest. The first is the speech by Ed Begley in which he reveals that his determination of guilt is based on nothing other than blind prejudice. During his speech, the jurors leave the table and turn their backs on Begley, who in the end acknowledges his bias. The second is when the final holdout juror, Lee J. Cobb, comes to grips with the fact that he hopes to punish the defendant as a means of vicariously punishing his own son, who has apparently rejected Cobb. Of course each of those instances are high melodrama -- would that racial or ethnic prejudice was as easily identified and eliminated as it was in the film -- but each is played out with sufficient intensity as not to seem hokey or contrived. The film does show its age in a couple of respects -- there are no women on this jury, and no people of color -- an all white male jury in late 1950's New York is pretty unlikely. Nonetheless, this is a superb film with tremendous performances by the ensemble cast. On another level, "Twelve Angry Men" betrays a kind of pre-Vietnam, pre-JFK assassination innocence about the ability of American ideals to triumph over all sorts of biases if only people are made to confront those biases. That idea is of course harder to sustain post-Vietnam, post-JFK murder, post-Watergate, but it is worthy of noting that not too long ago, it was still believed that such a triumph of ideals was possible. In the polarized nation we live in now, where the more obvious people's biases become, the more tenaciously they cling to them, the underlying message of "Twelve Angry Men" just might be one we need to hear.