Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 21-July-02
Spoiler Rating: High

Twelve Angry Men (1957)

Sidney Lumet's debut film, "Twelve Angry Men," is probably the most famous court drama in movie history, so I don't know why it has taken me so long to see it. As it turns out, however, I am glad that my first viewing took place after my first jury experience last year. Added to my high expectations for the execution of the film was my hope that it would offer truthful and thoughtful insight into the tenseness, difficulty, weaknesses, and strengths of jury deliberation. I was not disappointed on either account. This movie is deservedly a classic --- and a very frightening one.

Excepting a brief initial scene in the courtroom, the film takes place entirely in a drab, narrow, sweltering jury room on the hottest day of summer. The case to be decided involves an 18-year-old boy from a New York slum who is accused of killing his abusive father; as the judge announces at the start, execution is the mandatory punishment for a "guilty" verdict. Immediately upon their sequester, the twelve jurors take a vote and discover that only one of them, played by Henry Fonda, is voting "not guilty." Through the hot and heated hours that follow, the Fonda character gradually wins one man after another to his side (which isn't so much "not guilty" as "not sure" and therefore guided by the concept of reasonable doubt). Along the way, each man reveals some personal experience or trait that affects how he views himself and other people, and therefore the case at hand. Fights break out, prejudices are revealed, apathy is challenged, facts are shown to be conjectures, and in the end justice --- or as close as any jury can come to it --- is served.

Of course a film of this nature could not succeed without both an excellent script and a stellar cast. A few moments of sudden revelation crop up a little too easily to be fully believable, but these can be excused by the necessity of moving the story along. The actors are excellent across the board, most notably Lee J. Cobb as the angriest of the men, E. G. Marshall as the most deliberate, and Joseph Sweeney as the oldest, who has learned to look at people and see what others do not. The room and the faces of the men are nicely shot to emphasize the closeness of such disparate souls pent up together with a man's life at stake.

Despite the final image of a white-clad Fonda walking away into a cooling rain, ability to sleep at night intact, "Twelve Angry Men," like my own jury experience, left me feeling very uneasy. The insight the movie offers simply confirms what I thought before: our justice system is terrifyingly hit-or-miss, though probably the best we can do. (At least people can't smoke in the jury room anymore; let us be grateful for small advancements.) All of the worries that came to mind while I was sequestered were in evidence here: how so much rides on the ability, ineptitude, or apathy of lawyers; how people feel inconvenienced by jury duty and will vote just to cut it short and get back to their lives; how impossible it is to get twelve strangers to agree on anything; how a person's decisions cannot be separated from his or her own experiences, biases, or apathy, at least without a great struggle; how people are embarrassed to change their minds in front of others; and how the truth can almost never be known for sure. The movie also gave me a new thing to worry about: how the chronic desire to avoid getting involved in other people's messy lives extends even into the jury room (providing another inducement to cut short one's time there).

The bigotry, shallowness, and lack of objectivity on display in "Twelve Angry Men" were all scary enough, but nothing was as frightening as this sociopathic disinterest, which most of the men embraced with varying degrees of zeal (so to speak) at one point or another. At the beginning, almost all of the jurors were willing to send a kid to his death without the slightest discussion, because they believed he was irrefutably guilty or wanted to be somewhere else, but also because they just didn't want to discuss or consider such a thing as patricide in close quarters with a bunch of strangers. Instead, they retreated to an emotionally safe distance and attempted to keep the discussion centered on the weather, baseball, or their health. The Fonda character managed to win over a few people simply because he made them interested in the details of the case, which allowed them to shake off their indifference and roused their suppressed humanity.

This was a nice set-up for the movie drama that followed, but it struck me as all too real a possibility. I remember being shocked in a sociology class in college when we discussed a famous incident where a woman was raped on a street in broad daylight, and the entire neighborhood, hiding behind their curtained windows, did nothing, each person assuming that someone else would help or call the police. This happened in the 1960s or '70s --- is there any reason to believe that it could not happen now? Today, when caller identification and the Internet and supersterile, antibacterial everything are designed to protect us from the necessity of coming into contact with anyone else in any but the most controlled circumstances, this sort of apathy must be stronger than ever. And as long as it is, the jury system is doomed from the get-go. My only hope is that there are still people like the Fonda character around --- able to recognize their responsibility for their fellow man, and unloath and unafraid to accept that responsibility --- and that there is always one on every jury, or at least the juries that determine life or death.

What do you think the odds are of that?

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.