Human beings love convenience. Anything, whether it is a labour mentally or physically, is often treated by man as a riddle to see just how we can make it more convenient for us throughout the course of our lives.
We have a tendency to declare things unnecessary based on how much energy we expend carrying these tasks out. So, we look for a solution that is a quick and easy fix that allows us to leave us feeling good about ourselves. Sometimes this works to our advantage, and other times it works to our detriment. But one thing that people feel strongly about in regard to not taking the easy way out in the name of convenience is the truth, and by extension, justice.
In the west our judicial systems are seen as the epitome of how a fair and just government acts in administering justice to its citizens. But even the uninformed are aware of multiple cases of what we call a miscarriage of justice. Often times these miscarriages of justice happen despite evidence that clearly points to the accused being innocent or guilty, sometimes it is a black-and-white outlook on how justice should be carried out that decides the accused’s fate.
This raises the question of how far should we go in the pursuit of justice? Have you ever wondered how far people will go to make sure that it is carried out, or what challenges one man is willing to face to protect a young boy from a premature end? Are you interested in seeing how a group of men walk in to a room with their prejudices, ready to decide a young boy’s fate, only to have their perceptions on what they think they know challenged by one man who is not so easily convinced by all that appears to be?
Because if all this applies to you then I strongly suggest you look into: “12 Angry Men”. Released in 1957, and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Sidney Lumet, 12 Angry Men was a film that sought to provoke audiences with its confrontational attitude towards existing societal prejudices towards people from different social, racial, and economic backgrounds. The film has that same theme which seems to permeate throughout all Lumet’s movies, either implicitly or explicitly, and that is the relentless pursuit of justice.
Like Serpico (1973) and The Network (1976), 12 Angry Men features an ensemble cast, with Henry Fonda as the lead member, who have the same drive to establish justice within the midst of a seemingly corrupt situation as the titular Serpico (played by Al Pacino) and TV anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch). And this film was released almost twenty years before those. So, you could say that 12 Angry Men is a seminal work in the filmography of Sidney Lumet.
The film centres around a group of twelve jurors who are tasked with deciding whether the defendant is guilty, which in this case will send him to the electric chair, or not guilty. Not much is made clear about the twelve men, their names are not even mentioned, the only way they are distinguished is through their numbers as jurors.
The audience is not told anything miscellaneous about the jurors to help endear them to the viewers, rather the only thing that distinguishes these characters from one another, is in fact, their character.
Each juror’s identity is displayed by how he carries himself in that room during the time it takes to decide the fate of a young Puerto Rican man who is accused of murdering his father. Each juror has his role. You have: the analytical one, the slightly vapid one, the aloof one, the angry one, the wise one etc. And at the centre of it, is the main one. Henry Fonda, or “Number 8” as he is known in this story.
Fonda played his character with a sincerity that had you believe him every step of the way from the moment he began to express his doubts about the dubious facts upon which the rest of the jury unanimously agreed on as being convincing enough to send the young boy off to his death. Fonda did not play the role with a typical leading man energy. He was not some brooding rebel with a grudge against the system, rather he portrayed his character as one who had genuine concern for the life of another human being, a concern you can see in the way he appeals to the rest of the jurors, through compassion, empathy, and reason.
There really were not any true villains or heroes in the story. But if there were, it would be safe to presume Henry Fonda as the Protagonist of this film. And if there were an antagonist in this story, then it would have to be juror number 3.
Played masterfully by Lee J. Cobb, juror 3 stands in direct opposition to juror number 8. If juror number 8 represented the side of the spectrum that wanted to analyse the facts carefully before them so that they could make the right decision on whether to execute this man or set him free, juror 3 represented that side of the spectrum that wanted to brutalise the accused without any investigation into the particulars of the case, sighting his race and socio-economic background as evidence enough of his having committed the crime he was accused of.
Cobb played the role of the angry juror with a passion and intensity that had you irritated when you first heard him because of his blind willingness to go with the facts as they were, but it was worth listening to him just to have Fonda, and the rest of the jurors, challenge him and the evidence, which would lead to the contradiction of some aspects of the case that would lead both jurors 8 and 3 into a tug-of-war type scenario when it came to getting the jurors to decide whether the accused was guilty or not.
The story, through its masterfully crafted dialogue, did this tremendous thing of have the jurors make these brazen statements about the case in the beginning only to at some point during the film’s progression have those same remarks inverted and reflected back on them. This was an excellent use of dialogue as a way of conveying the message that a lot of prejudices and negative stereotypes about others can easily be turned back on ourselves when we try to direct it outwardly at others in anger.
Something that could be thought of as holding the film back though was its shying away from depicting a more visceral contempt at the accused in terms of his ethnic background. Now the with exemption of Juror 3, all the others (except for Juror 8) are firm in the beginning in their belief that the accused is guilty, but it never goes beyond that except for one true moment when one of the jurors lashes out at the rest, deriding the accused and the people from his community as being prone to being criminals.
While the moment is effective it’s the only moment of outright rage towards another person based on his ethnic background. There are comments throughout the film about children who grow up in slums, but they were merely sentiments that you could expect a middle-aged white man to have had in the 1950s.
This film came out in a time where certain language was not allowed to be heard, but it is a pity that that was the case, because in this instance the movie could have definitely gone a step further when it came to showing the depth of the bigotry of some of the jurors.
Sidney Lumet (with the help of his twelve jurors) was able to craft a story that is a timeless commentary on the nature of justice, and how far people are willing to go to see it established, and how far people are willing to subvert it so that that it correlates with their view of the world (something Juror 3 particularly suffered from).
12 Angry Men is a must-watch for anyone who wants an insight into how you question the status-quo in a way that does not belittle the people who are for it whilst actively trying to get them to consider a different way of looking at things. It is a must-watch for people who feel too constricted by the law and the governmental bodies that decide what good moral behaviour is, and who want to see what it looks like when twelve men from different backgrounds are left to their own devices to reason, analyse, and trust their instincts when deciding the fate of the accused.
Justice means different things for different people, but one thing is for certain, and that is that it is important to keep any human from being denied the right to it, as is stated in the Magna Carta:
“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”