movie reviews
12
The bailiff locks the doors of a Moscow high school gym and 12 jurors begin deliberations. It’s a seemingly open and shut case.“You’ll be done in 20 minutes,” the bailiff tells the men, who are responsible for deciding the fate of a Chechen kid who allegedly murdered his adoptive father, a Russian army officer. But at the last minute of what will be a unanimous guilty vote, one man slowly raises his hand to vote “not guilty.” With this act of defiance, the captivating story of 12 slowly opens like an origami rose in water.
Director Nikita Mikhalkov’s film about identity, race, and justice—based on Sidney Lumet’s remarkable 1957 film 12 Angry Men—filters the classic American legal drama through the Russian experience. In Russia, nothing goes according to plan. What begins as an exercise in devil’s advocacy quickly becomes an assault on the status quo as the objector pleads his case. “We’re talking about a human being. We just put up our hands, and that was it,” the nameless objector says much to the groaning disapproval of the other jurors, who were expecting a quick unanimous vote.
Cut off from the outside world, each of the 12 men represent different aspects of society. There’s the militant cab driver, the indecisive son of a TV mogul, a whimsical actor, a quirky surgeon with a troubled past, and Mikalov himself playing a retired older man who silently oversees the jury. The jovial nature of male social interaction begins to break down as the objector pleads his case to the other 11 men. One by one, the men change their minds in a Möbius strip of logic. The cab driver becomes the despot, seizing control of the jury and convincing them that the “Chechen dog” deserves life in jail. The introspective Jewish man pulls them back by sympathizing with the Chechen boy’s pariah status. The stuttering working class juror is caught in between as he tries to reconcile his personal experiences with the rhetoric of the well-educated men.
In that Moscow gymnasium, the men have no identity or past. They have no names to establish nationality, only accents and visual cues by which they judge one another’s authority. Like an adult version of Lord of the Flies, 12 dissects the structure of society and the social interactions of men. As the votes begin to change, each of the men describes the story of what led them to their conclusion. These remarkably acted and compelling monologues of heartbreak and loss, and triumph and tenderness, bind 12 together with the theatrical prowess of Lumet’s starkly minimalist film.
But 12 distinguishes itself through its vivid depictions of the Chechen boy’s life. Mikalov juxtaposes these images alongside the jurors’ heated discussions and guides the story along on parallel trajectories. As the film reveals the histories of the jury members, the boy’s life becomes clear, too. He was victim to a world of nebulous morality, the film pointedly (and maybe slantingly) argues. Without guidance, the boy is a pawn in the Russian/Chechen conflict. His heroes were neighborhood Chechen rebels when they were killed, and he was adopted by a Russian soldier who was responsible for the rebels’ death.
The act of the poor Chechen boy killing the Russian officer who adopted him becomes a transparent allegory of Russian history. But the meaning is unclear. Did the Chechens betray their adoptive fatherland, the Soviet Union, who graciously adopted the poor, Muslim region of Chechnya? Or is the message that Chechnya is an exploited child, wrongfully accused of being populated by killers and savages, and played as a card in a larger game of global politics veiled in an assault against their autonomy? Perhaps neither, or maybe both.
Although there are many culturally specific elements about Russia—the older men call each other “comrade” (still shedding the vestigial organs of Communism), the cab driver complains about feeling like a foreigner in his own town, the objector laments on Russia’s xenophobic relations with the West—12 effectively relates to an international audience. What is missed in the cultural specifics is made up by the evocative storytelling. The strength of the story isn’t in its setting—Lumet and Mikalov’s films could have been set anywhere from Kansas City to the Kamchackta Peninsula—it is in playwright Reginald Rose’s original treatment, which addresses the universal theme of how we orient ourselves in an ever-changing world. It asks the question: is anything beyond a reasonable doubt?
from Artist Direct, 03.06.09
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