Film

While we’re at it, let’s remake Gentleman’s Agreement at five hours, adding flashbacks to every wrong ever committed against the John Garfield character. More inflated than a 2005 CDO, Mikhalkov’s reworking of 12 Angry Men has plenty of flash but zero sense of proportion. It’s 45 minutes before these jurors even begin to discuss the evidence (the defendant is now a Chechen teen accused of murdering his adoptive father, a Russian army officer). Instead, they waste time mucking around the gym where they’re sequestered, even marveling at the cup size of a found bra. Eventually, several jurors deliver monologues illustrating the case’s personal meaning for them—scenes that suggest nothing so much as actors filibustering their own film.

To be fair, Mikhalkov (who won an Oscar for 1994’s Burnt by the Sun) plays the story less as a swift individual-responsibility parable than a broader allegory for Russia after the fall. A laundry list of social problems—drugs, education disparities, the struggles of minorities to make it in coveted professions, anti-Semitism and anti-Chechen bigotry—gets thumbed through before a verdict is finally rendered, cueing one of the jurors to open the windows and free the symbolic bird that’s been flying around the room. (Sidney Lumet: How could you forget the symbolic bird?) There’s a compelling film inside of 12, but it’s buried by a lot of pointless grandstanding.