"I don't know what the truth is. I don't suppose anybody will ever really know"

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2009)

Generally the premise of twelve middle aged men locked into a room arguing would hardly be considered the basis for particularly riveting or dramatic cinema, with theatrical potential at best, but hardly dynamic or visual enough to appeal to a mass audience. It can only be considered merciful that such an attitude was not one shared by television director Sidney Lumet, who instead seized advantage of a myriad of factors which could have resulted in a catastrophic film (a solitary location, a hasty shoot, budget constraints) and somehow extracted from them an effort to which the billing of 'one of the greatest motion pictures of all time' would be a title hardly disputed by the general public. Lumet's persistence in the face of adversity suggests he may have scented something great in the making, and the raw energy and crackling intensity 12 Angry Men generates is a testament that such dedication was entirely justified.
While the legal thriller is always a precarious genre, walking an uncertain line between being plausible in a real life context while avoiding being too slow and talky to appeal to an audience, Lumet centers in upon the inherent drama in the court setting, while consciously shying away from the tendency to approach such cases in black and white terms. What makes Fonda's Juror #8's solitary quest to sway his fellow jurors all the more compelling is the moral ambiguity of the situation. Fonda is not a white knight crusader unflappably convinced of the righteousness of his actions or the accused party's innocence - in fact, he openly admits that his actions may be resulting in the release of a guilty murderer. Instead, Fonda becomes a crusader for the ideal of truth and plausible evidence, notions that Lumet's film toys with throughout as its Rashomon-style construction of past events through various uncertain accounts becomes a more philosophical meditation on society's constant yearning for information and knowledge. Taking similar notes from Hitchcock's Rear Window, the film addresses the voyeuristic insatiable desire to be a privileged spectator, but crucially, just like the jurors, the audience is continually kept in the dark despite similar desperation to piece together a definitive account of the crime committed. Eventually the conclusion can be drawn that it scarcely matters in the end, as the facts of the case have become so twisted and warped by human preconceptions that only gut instinct and an earnest lust for honesty and justice can hope to prop up a system so reliant on fallible misconstructions.
And although Lumet draws out the tension surrounding the eventual verdict to uncomfortably taut levels, by the end, the crux of the film appears to scarcely center around the court case itself anymore, the focus subtly shifting instead towards the men deliberating it. The jury's cross section of middle aged men serves as a microcosm for 1950s variations on masculine identity, slowly but surely sweating away their polished exteriors to reveal the flaws, prejudices and hatreds concealed underneath. Masterfully tackling sensitive thematic issues such as class and age discrimination (while the teenaged suspect is initially dismissed as being a dangerous youth, the elderly woman witness' testimony is similarly scrutinized due to her age) the film dares to expose the dark secrets lurking beyond the wholesome exteriors of 1950s society without ever coming across as excessively heavy handed or moralistic. Indeed, the film could hardly be farther from it, as Lumet's remarkable deftness of touch makes the picture riveting as much through its subtlety as its heated emotional grandstanding, using slyly inconspicuous zooms and tensely circling camera-work to unobtrusively underscore the white knuckled drama of the scene without unnecessarily wrenching emotion out of the scene or performers.
Perhaps the film may be a few shades away from perfection, carrying a whiff of being overly coincidental and slightly unrealistic through having the jurors swayed one by one, but the unexpected moment of quiet humanity culminating the picture is a textbook example of the rare sort of uplifting ending which can ring true, and it is near impossible to dispute the raw power and honest intensity building up to that point, making the potentially dubious logic of the narrative easy to ignore and exceedingly difficult to resist.
Such a dialogue heavy story relies upon hefty acting clout to achieve full effect, and Lumet's uniformly exceptional cast does not disappoint, with not a single performer in the delightfully colourful and versatile collection of characters delivering an unsatisfactory or unbelievable performance. No one could have been better cast as the stoic protagonist Juror #8 than the time etched monolith of American honesty and decency that is Henry Fonda, and Fonda radiates the ideal quiet confidence to draw in the support of the audience as much as his fellow jurors. Fonda's unassuming lack of pretension makes him far more than the traditional populist hero, and his eshewal of soapbox moralizing in favour of calculated appeals to reason make his message all the more plausible, and his character all the more timeless. Lee J. Cobb similarly shines as the abrasive Juror #3, with Cobb's fleeting moments of tortured humanity barely discernible under an appalling mask of unsavoury characterization making his role far deeper than a simply stubborn oppositional force, and far more resonant. Martin Balsam is also a noteworthy presence as the level headed Juror #1, with a quirky edginess underscoring his appeals for reason, bringing a potentially simply expositional character to highly watchable life.
What could have made for a plodding, overly literary waste of time is instead transformed into crackling movie magic, bursting with barely stifled raw emotion and pulsing with social significance. 12 Angry Men is just about as sublime a legal thriller as one could hope to find, its reputation as one of the strongest American films of all time holding up, and the half a century since its release failing to dilute its power and abject fascination in the slightest.
-10/10