Richard Jewell

I am of two minds when it comes to Richard Jewell.  On one hand, Clint Eastwood has given us a well made, and very well-acted film.  There are moments here that are great, and the performances easily stand out.  I also admired Eastwood's signature laid back style which he uses to tell the story of an average and simple man who is thrust into the limelight, and then becomes a victim of it.  By all accounts, this is an emotional film.

But at the same time, something greatly bothered me while I was watching it.  There is a tone throughout the film that greatly distrusts both the media and law enforcement, and seems to be of the mindset that neither can be or should be trusted.  Rather than look at this subject in a thoughtful or perhaps even-handed way, the movie seems horribly one-sided.  It goes so far as to paint the film's main character who represents the news media as a woman who is not below prostituting herself in order to get a story or a leak.  This may not have been so bad if the film was intended as fiction, but this film is based on an actual event, and the woman who seduces a drunken FBI agent in a bar in order to get information in the film is based on a real person.  Even worse, the real-life woman is no longer with us, so she is not able to defend her character, or argue against the way she has been depicted here.

This creates an odd scenario.  The film itself is about a man who is wrongly accused and vilified by the media.  It argues against this mindset, and seems to be rallying against how the real life Richard Jewell was publicly persecuted without much evidence or information.  But at the same time, it does the very thing it's speaking out against by making this female reporter out to be a one-sided villain who often comes across as unhinged.  The woman in question is Kathy Scruggs, and as played here by Olivia Wilde, she is portrayed as an over the top drunken floozy who will sleep with anyone if it means advancing her own career.  The fact that she is the only reporter that the movie focuses on makes the film seem extremely one-sided, and almost like a smear campaign against the real life Scruggs, who again tragically died, and cannot defend herself against how this movie depicts her.  If the movie needed to have a villain, they should have made up a reporter, instead of smearing the name of a real person.

The story of Richard Jewell is set around the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.  Richard himself (played here by Paul Walter Hauser) is a big Southern lug who loves his mom (Kathy Bates), and has big dreams of becoming a police officer one day.  He's had security and law-enforcement jobs in the past, but they all ended because of his over zealous devotion to defending the law. (He was even once arrested for impersonating an officer, we learn.) It is Hauser who gives the film most of its charm, as he gives the character this almost like child-like innocence that helps us forget at times just how one-sided the screenplay by Billy Ray is.  He's a good guy, maybe simple minded, and definitely naive.  But the performance makes him likable, and we can sense the excitement he feels when he's offered a security job in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games.

During a rock concert held in the Park, Richard discovers a suspicious backpack which turns out to be a massive pipe bomb.  Due to his actions, many lives are saved, much more than there would have been had he not brought the bag to attention.  After the incident, Richard is hailed a hero, and is instantly interviewed on the Today Show, and offered book deals.  But an Agent with the FBI named Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) has his suspicions.  He thinks Richard fits the mold of a crazed lone bomber who set the whole thing up so that he could be a hero and get some attention.  Shaw leaks this information to reporter Scruggs during a drunken seduction in a bar, and next thing you know, the story of Jewell being the prime suspect is being splashed all over every major news media.  As Richard begins to be falsely persecuted in the public eye, the person who comes to his defense is the brash and hot-headed lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell).

Back in 2005, a man named Eric Rudolph confessed to the bombing, and other acts of terrorism as well.  However, you might not know that from this movie, which gives so little focus to who actually performed the bombing, his name is only mentioned once in passing.  Instead the movie focuses all of its blame and hate on the media and the FBI, both of which are depicted wholly as corrupt, and willing to do anything possible to make the lives of innocent people like Richard and his mother a living hell.  I'm not saying the movie should have downplayed what Richard must have gone through, as I'm sure it resembled a wide-awake nightmare.  But the way the movie just completely ignores the actual person responsible is kind of questionable.  It weighed heavily on my mind after the movie was finished, and made me wonder if Eastwood was just using this film as a personal mouthpiece to unleash some of his own anger in the disguise of telling another man's story.

And this is too bad, as outside of its message and tone, this is a film that has a lot going for it.  It's certainly a better movie than Eastwood's previous two efforts from last year, The 15:17 to Paris and The Mule.  This is a more focused film than they were, and it contains some stand-out performances from Hauser, Rockwell and Bates in the three leads.  They're all fantastic here.  I simply can't get past the way the movie shows its bias without actually trying to hide it.  Apparently, this film was originally a project that was set to star Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jewell and Bryant respectively.  They eventually moved on to other projects, but stayed behind as producers.  I'm not sure if their vision for the film was as narrow as the one we got, or if Eastwood demanded changes when he came on board as director.  All I will say is that this feels like a movie with a narrow field of vision, and whoever is responsible missed a great opportunity.

There is quite a lot to like about Richard Jewell, but the film's insistence on massaging the facts in order to fits its own beliefs and narratives kept me from fully embracing it.  Eastwood loves to tell stories about underdogs, and this could have been a great one.  Unfortunately, it gets lost in some messy moralizing.

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