12 Angry Men (1957)

So there are these men, twelve of them, and boy are they angry. That, in a nutshell, is the film. A jury convenes to decide the ruling of a possible murder and conflict ensues when a lone juror (Henry Fonda) votes not guilt while the rest of the jury votes guilty. Instead of caving into the peer-pressure of the group, the lone juror presents his case and slowly the entire jury reworks its way through the entire case.

The idea of an entire film that is just about people sitting around a room and talking sounds rather flat. But there’s more tension and drama in that one room than in most films. In its pure simplicity, the film heightens the drama, allowing it to be front and center with little flairs or frills about it. It could have added the entire court proceeding or started with an ambiguous shot of the murder, but the film is determined to let the drama reign supreme.

Yet the film could easily ended up being a stale and flat picture if not for the work of cinematographer Boris Kaufman and director Sidney Lumet who find interesting ways to capture the events on camera. There are only three scenes that take place outside the jury room, one in the courthouse, another in the bathroom and a final scene outside the courthouse. There are no flashbacks or visualizations of imagined scenarios, about 94 of the 96 minutes of 12 Angry Men take place in a room around a long table.

To keep the film from simply being a series of stale, straightforward close-ups of people talking the film finds ways to get the actors up and about throughout the film so that the camera can move along and follow them. In one corner of the room is a water cooler, in another a broken fan. There’s a closet in the room where the men hang their jackets and windows that are opened and closed. By having the actors interact with these things the camera gets a chance to move around enough so that there are never any prolong sequences of stillness.

And ever if there were, the characters are so dynamic that the stillness might not even be an issue. The twelve men each come from different backgrounds, professions and families. Some are obviously rich, others are minorities, and there are a couple of young men and one older gentleman.  The film finds that all their differences become breeding grounds for tension. One thing that one man assumes by default is something another man never even thought of.

And in the film’s best stroke, no one is painted as right or wrong. There are clearly people that are less agreeable than others—a few men are hotheads, one cracks jokes, another is indignant whenever he  is challenged—yet they all have legitimate experiences and pasts that make them feel the way they do about the case. As they talk about the case, one man often realizes something that the other does and another shares professional or personal knowledge that illuminates a part of the case.

It’s amazing how much we learn about the personalities of these people without ever learning all their names. There’s a depth and humanity to these men that is lacking in most films. A lot of it is simply in the way the actors play their roles, but some of it is in the obvious discrepancies. One man refuses to give the reasons behind his vote and yet demands it for another. Likewise, another man swears on the infallibility of a witness only to call the witness unreliable minutes later. The way the film shapes such human elements without ever judging the characters for it is what makes these characters real.

And it’s that realness that makes 12 Angry Men so good. The reason why the film resonates is because it rings true to how the world works. We each think we’re right, but with such a diverse number of views among people how can we know we are any more right than them? We could just as likely be wrong. Was the suspect actually a murder? In most any other film this would be proven without a shadow of a doubt, but 12 Angry Men is among such pettiness as proving anything. And that is its salvation.

© 2010 James Blake Ewing