The best film I’ve ever seen in the courtroom drama genre, simultaneously annulling its self-importance and adjudicating its necessity as an exercise in understanding our failings; the expanse of our nothingness told through an unbelievably great screenplay about unimportant men ruling over the most important decision.
It takes just one word to create life. And it takes just one to destroy it.
We don't get to witness any human other than these prisoners, or any place other than this city cell, but through their words, we can create an image of mankind that’s more than enough to fill entire pages of evidence or rather debunk it.
On the hottest day of the year, when the fans aren’t working, and hearts are hidden, it takes one room, one man, one extra knife, and the weight of an all-encompassing moral conundrum to paint the black-and-white picture of a trial with a tinge of doubt, impregnating the fellow suits with a possibility that —over the course of an evening— gestates <from> singular drops of sweat trickling down their overheated and overworked foreheads <into> a soul-shattering storm, a downpour sent from the gods to seep into the soaking shirts and sweating skin of these broken men in need of help, clearing all the humidity and hubris and hate, to awaken their buried layer of impartiality.
For a film that skirts around the table with heavy themes of legal system critique, racial profiling, capital punishment, and cognitive and implicit bias, it is surprisingly very funny. I caught myself laughing at several instances, but also teary-eyed, thanks to the incredible juxtaposition of introspective dialogue and diligently placed yet naturally evolving humor.
*
12 was a number that signified importance. It promised the power to be right, to be an apostle to a God, to be part of a pantheon, to be a month, an hour, a minute, a second. But we were wrong all along.
The sad thing is that we are nothing but words; that’s our only power. The good thing is that we don't need any history or myth or time to guide us with our words, we have the strongest measure already within us–our innate humanity.