12 Angry Men: A Borgesian Review

This is one movie that I was desperate to see and in the end, unable to catch it on TV or on DVD, I watched it on my ipod! For those who are not aware, 12 Angry Men is a 1957 movie, directed by Sidney Lumet (who later directed the widely acclaimed Murder on the Orient Express based on Agatha Christie's novel of the same name) and shot in black and white.

The premise is simplicity itself. On the conclusion of a murder trial, in which a boy's life hangs in the balance as he stands accused of having murdered his father, the twelve member jury is required to come out with a unanimous verdict. It is understood that a verdict of guilty is tantamount to a sentence of death. The jurors retire to discuss the case and find that all of them except one - juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) - are convinced of the boy's guilt. And on this momentous imbalance turns the plot of what is, according to me, one of the best movies ever made.

The scene of action is entirely restricted to the juror's discussion room. I can't think of a better sentence to describe the closed space than the following quote from Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space". As the movie progresses, the metaphor of the closed space becoming infinite works on two levels. On one level there's the obstinately objective and morally imaginative juror #8, trying to pry open the closed, prejudiced minds of the jurors to let them look at the case in an infinitely objective light. And as this begins to happen the room itself becomes a model of human society and grows infinitely larger, encompassing all the good and all the bad that humans are capable of. Mind numbing hatred, mediocrity, rationality, politeness, rudeness, prejudice in all its forms, every vice and every virtue in varying degrees find their place among the twelve jurors. It is comforting, though, that in the end objective reasoning and rationality win out.

None of this must, however, give anyone the impression that the movie is one long sermon about the conflict between reason and prejudice. One of the amazing things about this movie is that director Sidney Lumet and writer Reginald Rose take this simple, morally loaded premise and spin it into a taut, tightly scripted thriller with a mathematical proof of a screenplay! A thriller it definitely is. One that achieves edge-of-the-seat perfection by slowly and steadily building up tension by letting twelve different characters talk amongst themselves and taking the discussion irrevocably to its logical conclusion. Factual thinking and reasoning are all the rage now in corporate sectors. Here's a movie that's a supreme example of just that. For this reason let me reassert my opinion. One of the best movies ever made!