12

It's taken a good while for some of the Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees from 2007 to finally be released on DVD. I got a look at 12, from Russia, this weekend, and once Katyn is released next month, I will have seen all five nominees.

12 is an adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, the great Sidney Lumet film about how the common man can administer justice. This one, as you would expect, is set in Moscow. Director and writer Nikita Mikhalkov uses the basics of the Lumet film (and the play written by Reginald Rose) but infuses it with cultural touchstones that resonate more in Russia than they do here.

In this case the defendant is a Chechen youth who has been tried for murdering his foster father, a Russian officer. In the first vote, eleven jurors (they are all men) vote guilty, but one man insists that it's not such an open and shut case and urges further discussion. This drives many of the jurors crazy, particularly a bigoted cab driver, who refers to Chechens as savages (this character is sort of the Ed Begley and Lee J. Cobb characters from Lumet's film rolled into one). Slowly but surely the other jurors start to come around, but Mikhalkov inserts a twist toward the end that shakes things up.

A lot of things will be familiar to those who know the Lumet film. Key pieces of evidence are whether the knife used in the murder can be commonly purchased, or whether an elderly witness could have possibly gotten to a point to see the accused. But there are significant departures. The twelve men are not direct copies of the originals. Unlike Henry Fonda, the man who originally thinks the boy is innocent doesn't consistently take the lead in the argument, and it is the jury foreman, not the cabbie, who is the last holdout.

But where this film most deviates from the American version is how it reflects the dynamics of Russian society, and of course I'm not an expert on that so there may be lot that went right over my head. I certainly picked up on the sensitivity regarding Chechnya, and we do see much more of the defendant's backstory than the original film. Also, the jurors not only come to believe that he is innocent, but they also figure out who probably did the killing.

The film is very long--two hours and forty minutes--and really didn't need to be that long. Several of the characters have melodramatic monologues, while some of them are hardly heard from at all. There's also some heavy-handed symbolism in the shape of a bird that gets into the jury room (which is the gymnasium of a middle school). I wish I could comment on the actors, one of whom is Mikhalkov himself, but since the characters are only identified by number, I have no way of knowing who is who. Suffice it to say they are all excellent.