"It's always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth. I don't really know what the truth is. I don't suppose anybody will ever really know...but we have a reasonable doubt, and that's something that's very valuable in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless he's sure." -Juror #8
There is never more tension in the world of fiction than when a man's life is on the line. No matter if it's a cliffhanger scenario where we see if the hero will make it through next week's episode, or a standoff between two gunslingers at high noon. Drama and tension are the key factors that drive the plot. Nowhere is this more true than in the jury rooms of courthouses across the country.
12 Angry Men is about a young man standing trial for the murder of his father. It's up to the 12 jurors to decide whether or not this man can walk free or walk the green mile all the way to the chair. What ensues is a film that plays out in heated arguments, slanderous accusations, and wild prejudices. Its subject matter couldn't be more relevant, both for it's own time in 1957, and in today's modern world. Of course labels and names have changed, but the fact that people can let certain opinions blind themselves to the truth, or to the possibility of a different truth than their own, will always be relevant.
The way this film was shot is amazing. The whole setting only consists of four places, all of which are in or around the courthouse. The shots and edits make you feel just as claustrophobic as the jurors themselves. Long takes where the camera follows the banter between one juror and another, and then continues following the one that breaks off the conversation is definitely the predecessor to techniques used in films today like Birdman (2014).
The fact that you don't even know the absolute truth of what actually happened is astounding to me, and also refreshing. You only see the defendant once in the whole movie. This whole film is solely the deliberation of the jury and what they think. At the end of the day I guess that's all that really matters though, right? The thematic elements were really clever, too. The fact that people were hot and sweating continuously the whole time as arguments rose and heated up. The way they couldn't even get the fan going at the beginning but midway through when things start to come to light, guess what starts working? Even the paper towel machines in the bathroom don't even work.
And then there's the prejudice. One man starts a rant talking about how "You know how those people are," and it goes downhill from there. It's a sad world we lived in back then. We've come a long way from the ignorance of the past, but that doesn't mean it's not present here in today's world. The beauty of this picture lies in the way the other jurors responded to that kind of hate spewing narrow-minded speech.
My only complaint is some of the arguments for or against were weak. There was one instance with the eyeglasses that wasn't as credible as other arguments before it. But overall the movie stands tall as a beacon of what people can accomplish if they aren't afraid to stand up and speak the truth of what they believe, even if it starts out eleven to one.