Friedkin: 12 Angry Men (1997)

Although Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film may be the most famous version, 12 Angry Men actually started out as a teleplay, which Reginald Rose subsequently adapted for the theatre and cinema. Released in 1997, William Friedkin’s telemovie aims to get back to that original moment, if only to open up the story for a new generation. To that end, he more or less discards Lumet’s immaculate tracking-shots and unbroken takes, replacing them with a loose, languorous Steadicam that rides the waves of paranoia and prejudice rippling across the jury room like it’s just another volatile, overheated juror. Sweating a low-def sheen that captures each actor at their most haggard, corpulent and unflattering, it’s a camera that feels utterly exhausted by forty years of waiting for the death penalty to be repealed, forty years in which Rose’s screenplay has somehow failed to produce its effect. Reasonable doubt feels slipperier and more fragile than ever, as Friedkin opts to include many or all of the jurors in each frame, with the result that you’re usually distracted from who’s talking by who’s listening, oppressed by the brooding, humid concentration of it all, especially since this cast is so much more star-studded than in any previous version. With appearances from Courtney B. Vance, Ossie Davis, George C. Scott, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dorian Harewood, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Jack Lemmon, Hume Cronyn, Mykelti Williamson, Edward James Olmos and William Peterson, it’s often more like a celebrity re-enactment than an adaptation per se, closer to a protest performance than Lumet’s version, although that may also simply be the most efficient way to revive Rose’s story, which is too tightly wound to leave much room to manoeuvre, too evidentiary to leave much in the way of narrative to appropriate or transform. What Friedkin does have some control over are the demographics and dispositions of the jurors, most of whom are now African-American or European in origin, just as the case itself becomes something of a flashpoint in Hispanic discrimination, which was starting to gain more visibility around this time. Admittedly, there are no women – apart from a brief cameo from Mary McDonell as the presiding magistrate – but that may also be because Friedkin works best with the kind of precipitous masculinity on parade here, drawing out the jurors’ adolescent racism so eloquently that the teenphobia of the original is more or less redundant. By the end, the jury room is hysterical as a port of entry, a study in border security that’s determined to break free of its televisual parameters while somehow just as anxious to pay homage to the telemovie as the last great gasp of sound stages and small rooms, barriers and boundaries that Friedkin elegises even as he sets out to tear them down.