“Everything here is very Russian somehow,” muses one of the 12 in 12, Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov’s reconvening of 12 Angry Men in contemporary Moscow. The boy on trial for killing his father is now a Chechen and saddled with all the unfortunate baggage that entails. The jurors are still all men, though, as the truncated title implies, they’re not all that angry anymore. This is Russia, after all, and postwar American presumptuousness and obliviousness has been replaced by post-Soviet cynicism and fatigue. Even the lone initial holdout on the required unanimous decision of guilty bares only the vaguest hint of the righteousness, endurance and authority that characterized Henry Fonda’s character in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 sorta classic.
The ostensible Russianness of 12 is compounded by the film’s epic duration, which stays in session for well over an hour longer than its predecessor. Yet the gist of the story’s developments—the airing of racial or classist prejudices, the unearthing of negligent representation of the defendant, the revelation of personal agendas, the swaying of one juror after another—is remarkably faithful to the source material. What makes 12 so long, and what makes it at times feel longer, is a lot of overly elaborate choreography in the school gymnasium that serves as makeshift jury quarters; overlong, melodramatic digressions and tangents on the parts of nearly everyone present; ongoing cutaways to the defendant stoically waiting in his cell; and flashbacks to urban war zones to help us reflect on the sort of unforgiving world the kid comes from. All these elements seem designed to “open up” what was essentially a chamber piece playing out in real-time, but they really just sap the film’s urgency, distract from the issues at hand, and confuse the film’s sense of purpose.
Rather than focus on the ambiguities of justice and the looming threat of infection from reasonable doubts, 12 makes partial attempts to give the audience the trail the jurors never saw—the one the defendant deserved. But the evidence as displayed is wildly inconclusive. All that really matters, or should matter, is what happens in the room. The true tension arises from our inability to know anything more about what really happened than they jurors know, to gradually understand that uncertainty is inescapable, that even if the kid did kill his dad he cannot be lawfully convicted based on what the jurors have been able to glean during the trail.
Of the dozen performers, it’s interesting to note that the strongest, most welcome presence is that of the man quietly controlling everything, onscreen and off. Malhalkov himself plays the jury’s foreman, his large, round shoulders and philosopher’s beard rendering him a grounding force at the head of long table. His character holds a trump card close to this chest until the stretch, a tricky surprise alteration on the original film that’s a curious commentary on the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the Russian legal system and social mores, though it is finally of little consequence with regards to where our story finally falls.
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