12 Angry Men (movie review)

Directed by Sidney Lumet
Cast: Henry Fonda as Juror #8/Mr Davis
(DVD Synopsis:The defence and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case of murder soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.)

At first, the scenario of one juror trying to turn the table doesn’t seem plausible. He’s Henry Fonda… you know he’s the hero…the undeniable catalyst. Preconceiving the course of events comes easy…but when the drama builds up in the juror room…you wait for it to unfold.

Willing suspension of disbelief doesn’t take long to creep in for what you see are believable characters not trying to be larger than life… — the distraught, bitter father, the worldly-wise septuagenarian, the impatient garage owner, the cause & effect doc, the swings any-which-way ad man, the fence-sitters…

No flashy “I-can-prove-he-hasn’t-killed” rhetoric follows…Instead, the “I don’t knows” spouted by Fonda reinforce the fact that he ain’t trying to be the saviour…just the sceptic maybe…or better yet… the only one who’s given his verdict some thought… It’s a different argument altogether that he could have gone with the flow and dismissed it as open and shut just like the others — he too has a job to do, you know. But flesh his character out a bit and you know that principles far outweigh everything else for this gentleman.

Another interesting aspect is that, there is just a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of the accused at the beginning of the film. So the formula of garnering sympathy for the underdog — in this case the Puerto Rican has been clearly ruled out. Good move.

The whole beyond reasonable doubt angle… is what takes the movie forward. So minus the pseudo hero act, Fonda’s underplayed ‘suppose this were to happen’ arguments make it palpable.

And what’s more no fancy camerawork or unusual head shot angles here… Almost 99% of the film is confined to the juror room — one monotonous setting. Yet the unraveling of the murder… that too by ordinary people (yes, it only happens in films!!!) makes it riveting.

Cut & dry case, they say…I say it’s cut & dry production that owes its brilliance to all the characters…in particular to the exceptionally subtle Fonda and the blatantly loud father (Lee Cobb)…representing two sides of the coin… Yup, it’s an out-of-the-court-room drama worth watching without a “reasonable doubt” whatsoever!


links: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/
http://www.filmsite.org/twelve.html