Twelve Angry Men

"Twelve Angry Men" does exactly what it's supposed to do. An amazing feat for a movie, I say. So often we start out with high expectations and we're disappointed. We balk at a movie that claims it will provide us with a profound experience.

Here, You start out with one juror who believes the boy is innocent and you know he's supposed to convince all the other jurors. They are ready to send the boy to the electric chair. It's the proverbial lone juror. Ay ay ay.

So you know the situation immediately. You know what is supposed to happen. You know that, by the end, all the jurors will be persuaded to change their minds. You know too that, this will have implications beyond the personal, beyond the political. It will teach us something about the quality of humanity.

However, it seems impossible! Both for Henry Fonda and for the movie. How can one man persuade all these other men (who are not just angry, but sweaty, impatient, bullying, rude, and exhausted, who have people to see and places to go) to change their position on something so serious as a murder? This is an old-fashioned, deeply serious, moral movie. Yet how can one little movie teach us something truly profound about the humanity in all of us? Wow. Even as I write the words, it sounds like too much to take. "Give me a break!" I might say. Or "Don't give me that!" Sounds overbearing, over-profound, too much for this movie to shoulder.

Yet, it succeeds 100% and there isn't an overblown moment in the whole darn thing. It is one of those extremely rare things - the perfect movie.

Takes you for a ride, entertains you, lets you coast while it does all the work (another rare feat for a movie, at least these days), keeps you guessing, you're in suspense - you think you can predict it but you can't, keeps you emotionally involved - you actually care about each and every character! - and keeps you at the center of the issue, never leaves you bored or yawning, it makes you laugh, makes you think, makes you re-evaluate your own certainty about whether certainty is possible. Makes you re-evaluate what it means to be a human being, what is at the heart of all of us. And lets you do all this without getting irritated with yourself. What a treat.