12 Exasperatingly Talkative Men

The 1957 film version of 12 Angry Men has one of my favourite movie endings ever. We’ve just spent about 90 minutes inside a cramped jury room as one lone man (Henry Fonda, in his quintessential “humble liberal crusader” role) convinced his fellow 11 jurors to change their votes from “guilty” to “not guilty.” It was a slow, painstaking process, full of exasperating arguments and emotional confrontations, but at the end of it, everyone in the room knows they’ve done the right thing and prevented a miscarriage of justice. Now Fonda is making his way down the courtroom steps, enjoying his first breath of fresh air, when the birdlike old man who was Fonda’s first ally in the jury room approaches him. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asks.

“Davis,” Fonda replies.

“My name’s McArdle.” An awkward pause. “Well... so long!”

After all the sweaty, dramatic angst that has preceded it, the quick, unpretentious, offhandedness of that exchange gets a laugh out of me every time. (And I’ve watched 12 Angry Men a lot, probably at least once for every juror.) But there’s very little that’s offhanded or unpretentious (or quick) about 12, a new Russian adaptation of 12 Angry Men directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, who also plays the quietly philosophical jury foreman. This version is two and a half hours — a full hour longer than Sidney Lumet’s original — and it has what feels like at least three endings, none of them an improvement on the one Lumet and screenwriter Reginald Rose came up with.

In Mikhalkov’s version, the young man accused of killing his father is Chechen, not Puerto Rican, and some of the occupations of the jurors has been changed — for instance, the glib Madison Avenue ad man is now a mama’s boy TV executive, the salesman with tickets to a baseball game burning a hole in his pocket is now a musician whose troupe is leaving on tour that night. The action in the Russian version also takes place in a school gymnasium. But the main story points are still here: the gradual winning over of the other jurors, some swayed by logic, some by emotion; the Dogville-style re-enactment of the crime; the Encyclopedia Brown dismantling of seemingly ironclad evidence of the defendant’s guilt.

So what’s that extra hour made of? Pretty unnecessary stuff, mostly. But while I was generally willing to put up with all the garrulous Russian crosstalk, with all the stagy business with the lights symbolically cutting out or the bird that somehow gets into the room and starts flying symbolically around, and even with the lengthy showpiece monologues that Mikhalkov gives to nearly every actor in the cast, Mikhalkov’s decision to repeatedly cut away to shots of the defendant in his cell and to flashbacks to his childhood seemed not just sentimental, not just redundant, but a blatant violation of the spirit of the material. 12 Angry Men is a story about deduction, about evaluating faces and piecing together bits of evidence to arrive at sound conclusions. It’s about thinking for yourself. No version of 12 Angry Men should begin the way this one does, with a dream sequence taking place in the defendant's imagination.

Still, the underlying architecture of this story is so sound that it remains gripping and entertaining, even in as protracted a form as we get here. Mikhalkov’s cast is highly watchable — he must have told his casting director to find him every pudgy, voluble, out-of-breath middle-aged actor in Russia — and every half hour or so, he throws in a memorable visual image (like a juror finding a piano stowed away in a metal cage and sticking his hands between the bars to play it). I’d say it’s worth seeing, but you wouldn’t need to be Henry Fonda to convince me to change my vote.