Producers: Clint Eastwood, Tim Moore, Jessica Meier, Adam Goodman and Matt Skiena   Director: Clint Eastwood   Screenplay: Jonathan Abrams   Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Chris Messina, Kiefer Sutherland, J.K. Simmons, Gabriel Basso, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Francesca Eastwood, Amy Aquino, Adrienne C. Moore, Zele Avradopoulos, Drew Scheid, Chikako Fukuyama, Rebecca Koon, Hedy Nasser, Onix Serrano, Jason Coviello and Tom Thon   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: B

Jonathan Abrams’ contrived if provocative script is saved from a fatal case of implausibility by the tidy treatment Clint Eastwood brings to “Juror #2,” which may wind up being the veteran actor-director’s last film.  The combination of legal drama and character study could be ruled summarily out-of-court on the basis of the unlikely premise and a succession of improbabilities, but Eastwood, a committed cast and an experienced technical crew make the unlikely story go down easily, while ensuring that its critical observations about the American judicial system come across.

The film is clearly intended as a clever rejoinder to Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic “Twelve Angry Men,” Reginald Rose’s encomium to the jury system in which a principled man stands up alone against an immediate verdict of murder against a disadvantaged youth and eventually persuades the other eleven to find him not guilty.  Here, a lone juror argues against a quick decision against a murder conviction, but not out of principle—unless it be the principle of self-interest.  Lumet’s film can be viewed from today’s more jaded perspective as a smugly sanctimonious paean to the system; Eastwood’s argues that the process is rife with weaknesses that can easily undermine the search for justice.

The protagonist is Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a Georgia magazine writer summoned for jury duty.  He’d like to get out of serving, because his wife Allison (Zoey Deutch), a schoolteacher, is in the final stages of a delicate pregnancy, made more fraught because the couple are still grieving a miscarriage she suffered the previous year.  But primly tough Judge Hollub (Amy Aquino) won’t let him off the hook, and both prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) and defense counsel Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) accept him for the panel.

The defendant is James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), a guy with a long rap sheet accused of killing his girlfriend Kendall (Francesca Eastwood) after an argument in a roadside bar.  He’d accosted her in the parking lot after she stalked off (the altercation actually caught on a cell phone), and witnesses saw him follow her in his car after she left on foot down a country road during a blinding rainstorm.  The next morning a hiker found her body beside the road, her head bashed in.  An elderly witness (Tom Thon) identified Sythe as the man he saw at the site where the corpse was found, revving up his stopped car and speeding away.

Killebrew sees the case as a slam dunk that will be of enormous help in the “tough on crime” campaign she’s waging for district attorney.  Resnick, a public defender and old law school classmate of hers, is convinced, however, that his client is innocent and that the police rushed to judgment. 

As both present their opening arguments, Kemp is shaken.  A recovering alcoholic, he remembers being at the same roadside bar the night of Kendall’s death, staring at a glass of whisky he’d ordered—but not drunk—while distraught over Allison’s miscarriage.  He’d hardly noticed the argument between James and Kendall but had driven down the road she’d taken shortly afterward, and in his traumatized state had hit something in the rain.  He stopped to investigate but found nothing but a “deer crossing” sign and drove home, telling his wife that the accident had happened elsewhere so that she wouldn’t know he’d been at a bar.  But now he wonders whether it was a deer he’d struck, and whether he’s really the guilty party—so much that he asks his AA sponsor Larry Lasker (Kiefer Sutherland), a lawyer, what might happen if he went to the judge and revealed the truth.  Lasker’s response is not comforting: Kemp could easily be charged with homicide—unless the jury he’s sitting on reaches a verdict, one way or another.

If he were the ramrod-straight character played by Henry Fonda in Lumet’s film, of course, he would confess and suffer the consequences.  But doing so would ruin his marriage and his life, so he tries a different approach, rendering the narrative on the one hand a study of a deeply flawed character desperately trying to make what he thinks is the best of a terrible situation, and on the other a portrayal of how he aims to manipulate his fellow jurors.

He gets support early on from Harold (J.K. Simmons), a former police detective implausibly serving on the jury who, believing Kendall’s death was a hit-and-run, undertakes an investigation of his own, which Kemp sabotages because it could wind up pointing to him.  When Harold is removed by the judge for his improper search for new evidence, he’s replaced by Irene (Zele Avradopoulos), a zealous true crime fan equally drawn to the conclusion that James isn’t guilty.  On the other hand, Marcus (Cedric Yarbrough) is absolutely committed to voting guilty, though he’s driven by prejudice just as the last holdout in “Angry Men” was—in this case, against a defendant he identifies with the gang culture that killed his brother.  Others mirror jurors in Lumet’s film as well—like Denice (Leslie Bibb), the forewoman nervously trying to keep order, and Yolanda (Adrienne C. Moore), who just wants to get home.

But the major twist comes when Killebrew begins to doubt Sythe’s guilt and takes up the evidence Harold had collected.  She also questions whether the old man’s identification of Sythe can be depended on (another nod to “Men”). Like Kemp, she’s confronted by an ethical dilemma that could affect her life and career.

Eastwood’s handling of this material is typically unfussy, but also careful, as in the precision with which he and cinematographer Yves Bélanger deal with perspective in the periodic flashbacks to the fateful night.  The Savannah setting is caught nicely in Ron Reiss’s production design, and Marc Mancina’s subdued score is effective.  Editors Joel and David Cox help to keep the twists clear, at least until the close, when the narrative style switches gears, turning rushed and determinedly elliptical.  That’s a deliberate choice, however, since at that point Eastwood wants to keep viewers guessing about precisely what’s happening.  Even the last shot is marked by ambiguity; one’s meant to speculate about what will happen next, rather than being definitively told.

Some will consider that cheating, but it’s all of a piece with Eastwood’s intention to throw doubt on the workings of the system, and can hardly be considered a flaw, though one can question whether it’s carried off as skillfully as it might be.  A larger question involves some of the performances.  While Collette delivers strongly as Killebrew even when the character seems a mite obtuse, Simmons is his usual formidable self and Messina is pleasantly nuanced, neither Deutch nor Sutherland is given much to do, and the jurors vary from dully naturalistic to over-the-top.  Most problematic, however, is Hoult, who’s directed to act so guiltily—clumsily dropping Harold’s evidence or turning away abruptly whenever anyone who might recognize him from the bar enters the frame, for instance—that everyone else comes across as a bit dense for not noticing his odd behavior.  Even Allison seems slow on the uptake about her husband’s sweaty demeanor.

That only reinforces the feeling that “Juror #2” is basically implausible.  But if Eastwood and his collaborators can’t conceal that, they manage to make the film engrossing, and even thought-provoking, despite it.

Producers: Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Semler and Ewa Puszczyńska   Director: Jesse Eisenberg   Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg   Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes   Distribution: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: B

If one were forced to categorize Jesse Eisenberg’s road trip film, tragicomedy probably fits best.  But “A Real Pain” is only fitfully funny, and the drama it depicts in its characters pales beside that they are contemplating from many years’ distance.  It does, however, portray both in a tone that allows for some dark humor and sharp observation. 

Eisenberg’s script shares its basic premise with Julia von Heinz’s recent “Treasure,” in which an American journalist (Lena Dunham) dragged her hesitant father, a Holocaust survivor played by Stephen Fry, on a journey through Poland in an attempt to recover her family history.  Here the travelers are the Kaplan cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who have been left a bequest by their much beloved, recently deceased, grandmother Dory, also a Holocaust survivor, to make a similar trip together.  The purpose is to immerse them, to some extent at least, in her background, but also, it would seem, to encourage them to rediscover the brotherly closeness they’d once enjoyed.

Despite that earlier camaraderie, they’ve grown up to be very different.  David, though skittish and unconfident, is the responsible one, with a solid job in New York City (digital advertising), along with a loving wife and son.  Benji, on the other hand, is a drug-addicted slacker, living with his mother in Binghamton and, we eventually learn, a self-destructive bent.  Yet he’s outgoing, easily charming everyone he encounters in spite of a habit of being honest with them, sometimes brutally so. 

David, a fastidious planner, has booked them for a group tour of Poland that will allow them to detach themselves for a separate trip to their grandmother’s erstwhile home town.  Their meeting at the airport for their departure is effusive, though the fact that Benji’s been there people-watching for hours takes David aback.  At the Warsaw hotel, to which Benji has mailed a packet of choice weed, they meet James (Will Sharpe), the intense British historian who will lead the tour, and their fellow journeyers: recently-divorced Marcia (Jennifer Grey), remaking her life after coming back to New York from California; older middle-class couple Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who converted to Judaism after enduring the Rwandan genocide.

All of the group members are spotlighted briefly along the way as they pass through sites that James chooses as emblematic of the Jewish experience in Poland—a memorial to the resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, a Jewish cemetery, the old Jewish quarter in Lublin, the Majdanek concentration camp near the city—and the actors take maximum advantage of the opportunities, as when Michal Dymek’s camera catches each face as they pass the opening to the camp’s gas chamber.  But still they’re portrayed largely in terms of their interactions with the cousins, and particularly Benji, whose oversized personality, attractive but often off-putting—fascinates them, leading them to embrace even his most outrageous ideas, like posing as fighters beside the sculpted resistance heroes in the Warsaw memorial.  Benji even shames James into admitting that his constant recitation of facts is inappropriate at sites, like the cemetery, where silence would be welcome.

But it’s the complicated relationship between the cousins that’s the fulcrum of the narrative.  David is often embarrassed and apologetic about Benji’s actions, and upset when Benji belittles him or does things that undermine the smoothness of the trip, like neglecting to wake him at a train station where they were scheduled to disembark.  A train ride is also involved in one of Benji’s outbursts about riding the tracks so comfortably when Jews were once crammed in cattle cars on their way to death camps.

The cousins’ tangled bond is nicely caught in the screenplay and direction, but it’s fully brought to life by the two lead performances.  In many respects Eisenberg is doing familiar shtick, but he does it with considerable nuance while ceding center stage in great measure to Culkin, who manages to capture poignantly both his character’s manic charisma and the profound sadness beneath the exterior.  When, having found where Dory once lived and finding the current occupants not terribly welcoming, they fly back to New York and part at the airport, each resuming his life, the viewer is left to ponder what has changed in their understanding of the past, each other, and themselves.

Simply shot by Dymek, edited without frills by Robert Nassau, and scored almost completely with excerpts of Chopin played by pianist Trvi Erez, “A Real Pain” nimbly juggles confronting historical horror and coming to terms with familial relationships that have evolved over time.  Serious at its core but seizing opportunities for bleak humor, it represents a substantial accomplishment for both multi-hyphenate Eisenberg and the mercurial Culkin.