Flawed retelling of fake news rap gone legit
“Richard Jewell” is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-yearold director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways. You may loathe parts of it, and still come out shaken and teary-eyed. You can choose to read it apolitically, if you squint hard enough.
Bolstered by its cast — the culminating scenes get the finesse they require from Paul Walter Hauser, Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell — it tells the story of how a hungry, sloppy media and a sloppy, hungry FBI nearly destroyed the life of an Atlanta security guard. Jewell was suspected, wrongly, of planting a pipe bomb killing two and injuring more than 100 amid the ’96 Summer Olympics.
The screenplay’s version of Jewell is noble simplicity incarnate. Billy Ray, who wrote the very fine “Captain Phillips,” works from Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair feature. The film begins in 1986. Jewell (Hauser) clerks at an office where he meets attorney Watson Bryant (Rockwell).
Ten years later, he’s living with his Godfearing, patriotic mother, Bobi (Bates), working at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. One night he spots a suspicious backpack and calls it in. The nail-studded bomb explodes, but Jewell’s discovery makes him a hero.
And then the worms turn, along with the viewer’s stomach. Personified by Jon Hamm’s agent, the FBI fingers Jewell as a
loner who craved attention and may have planted the bomb in order to discover it. Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs extracts a tip from the Hamm character — in bed, according to the movie. Presto: a Page One smear job on Jewell, inferring that he’s the bomber. Fangs bared, Olivia Wilde does what she can as Scruggs, a journalist (conveniently dead in real life).
Thus begins Jewell’s nearly three-month ordeal, holed up in his mother’s apartment.
The smaller the scenes, the truer the drama. For years we’ve seen Hauser go to town as various, thick-skulled Bubbas (“BlacKkKlansman”). Here, in the later scenes with Bates, he’s allowed to flower as an actor. Bates and Rockwell are rock-solid scene partners. The best of “Richard Jewell” is easily the best work Eastwood has done in a while.
What the media and the FBI actually did, in real life, was bad enough; in “Richard Jewell,” however — and this is a serious limitation — even the true or true-ish events have a way of feeling like fake dramatizations of fake news and institutional failures. Trump’s enemies, the press and the government, are this movie’s enemies. The building blocks are there in what happened to Jewell in real life. Eastwood can’t resist adding extra relish.
Eastwood neither glamorizes nor suffocates the circumstances of these people. This isn’t a character study. It’s good and evil: good people vs. evil institutions throwing salt in the wounds suffered by the salt of the earth.
As with Eastwood’s “Sully,” along with many other Eastwood pictures, “Richard Jewell” stands up for the old-fashioned, law-andorder, God-and-country white male, under siege and undercut by bureaucratic idiocy and enemies of the people. In the spirit of Eastwood’s biggest hit to date, “American Sniper,” “Richard Jewell” isn’t interested in a multifaceted or fully truthful depiction of its battle-tested survivor.
The battle, for Jewell (who died in 2007, from various health crises), was on the home front. The enemy was us. The actors transcend the simplifications, and make Eastwood’s 38th feature behind the camera something worth arguing about.