Tale of Olympics attack becomes truly JEWELL’S
THIS tense, touching and well-acted drama is based on a true story.
Although, if you can’t remember the terror attack at the 1996 Olympics, you could be forgiven for thinking that director Clint Eastwood made it up.
While Atlanta was hosting the Games, a tubby security guard called Richard Jewell (played by a brilliant Paul Walter Hauser) spotted an abandoned rucksack underneath a bench during a concert.
He notified the police and was pushing the crowd back when it exploded.
One woman died and scores of people were injured but it seemed he had saved many lives. But after he was interviewed on TV about his heroics, the FBI began to look into his private life.
It turned out he was a loner who lived with his mother, collected guns and had made several failed attempts to join the police.
Using that tried-and-tested technique (collar the nearest oddball), the FBI made him their only suspect. They were convinced he planted the bomb to get attention.
After a local newspaper was tipped off, the press camped outside his home and Jewell’s reputation ended up in tatters.
As the villains in this tragic tale work in the mainstream media and law enforcement, some critics in the US have interpreted it as being a propaganda piece for the recentlyimpeached US president.
To me, they are making the same mistake as Jon Hamm’s blinkered FBI agent.
It’s true that the Press (represented here by Olivia Wilde’s vile reporter) are painted with painfully broad strokes, and that Jewell ticks most of the boxes of the Eastwood hero.
Like Sully (the pilot from his 2016 true story), he’s a straight-shooter betrayed by a posse of lily-livered desk jockeys.
But, however you cut it, most of this tale actually happened.
In the opening scene, Jewell is a law-obsessed clerk who is widely ridiculed while working at an Atlanta law firm.
Sam Rockwell’s maverick attorney Watson Bryant is the only person who doesn’t see him as an easy target.
When he quits after landing a job as a security guard, Bryant gives him a piece of advice.
“Don’t be an asshole,” he says. “A little power can turn a person into a monster.”
When we jump forward to 1996, Jewell has indeed become an asshole. After we see him manhandling a student, he is sacked as a security guard on a college campus. We learn he has already been dismissed from his previous job at a sheriff’s office, but he lands a temporary gig at the Olympics. Eastwood stages the terror attack with verve, but the film really comes alive after Jewell contacts Bryant for help.
After the lawyer remembers who he is, he agrees to represent him and the pair form a darkly funny double act. Bryant is furious with the way the investigation is being handled.
But Jewell is his own worst enemy. He is so keen to ingratiate himself with the FBI he seems determined to fit himself up.
Hauser was hilarious playing the hapless conman in I, Tonya, and he raises some uncomfortable laughs out of Jewell’s unfailing politeness.
He also manages to break your heart with his humanity.
Kathy Bates, who plays his mother, also gets some devastating moments. One minute she is bursting with pride, the next she is being accused of raising a murderer.
Mentally, Eastwood’s victim may have some similarities with Trump, but propaganda is never as nuanced, nor as affecting, as this deeply human drama.