Hypocrisy sees Jewell lose lustre
Richard Jewell
(M, 129 minutes) Directed by Clint Eastwood Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
In 1996, Richard Jewell was a security guard at the Atlanta, Georgia, Olympic Games. He was employed by a venue that was hosting musical events for the athletes and public to mingle.
Late one night, while talking to a group of teenagers who were making a racket, Jewell spotted an abandoned backpack. Showing all of the over-zealousness and lack of willingness to just relax and let things slide that had cost him several previous jobs, Jewell called it in.
To everyone’s amazement, the backpack turned out to actually be a bomb. And a particularly nasty nail bomb at that. The bomb did detonate, but not before Jewell, his colleagues and the police had got most people out of the immediate vicinity. Two people died and scores were injured. But had it not been for Jewell and his immense dedication to taking his work seriously, the results would have been much worse. Jewell was hailed as a hero. He was offered book deals and received messages of support from the highest levels. And then, the bottom fell out.
Jewell was a big guy, much given to comfort eating. He was single and lived at home with his mother. He had a history of being dismissed from similar work, was an ex-police officer and also had a conviction for impersonating a police officer. All of which made him understandably a ‘‘person of interest’’ to the FBI. A similar bomb scare at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 had been the work of a security guard with a grievance. It was only reasonable that Jewell would be looked at, hard. What wasn’t reasonable was that the FBI would leak their interest in Jewell to a local reporter. The story exploded in the vacuum of news that had surrounded the investigation – and Jewell became an untried villain around the world.
Richard Jewell is director Clint Eastwood’s trip through the known facts – mostly – of the Jewell case.
Eastwood brings a nicely unadorned, but still definitely filmic, sensibility to the job.
His commitment to getting the script on the screen with clarity is as admirable as ever. And here, with an Oscar-nominated Kathy Bates as Jewell’s mum and Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) as the title character, Eastwood has a reliable and talented cast working for him. Even better – as always – is Sam Rockwell as Jewell’s lawyer, Watson Bryant, who the film would have us believe worked singlehandedly to have Jewell released. It’s nonsense of course. Watson, as portrayed here, is a composite of several different people. But Rockwell still sells him to us a credible and charismatic presence.
The real problem with Richard Jewell is another, incidental character. The film portrays the (real-life) journalist Kathy Scruggs –of The Atlanta JournalConstitution, as someone who was willing to trade sex for a story.
According to everyone who knew Scruggs (she died in 2001, aged 41), she was a hard-nosed, hard-charging and quite brilliant reporter with an unbeatable nose for a story. But no-one, not even the cops she routinely drank with after-hours, ever saw her behave as Eastwood presents her here.
For a film about the efforts to clear one man’s name, the treatment of Scruggs in Richard Jewell seems like hypocrisy – with a side-order of misogyny – of the worst sort. It’s a massive blight on an otherwise very competently told and engrossing story.