‘RICHARD JEWELL’ BLENDS FACT AND FICTION
Audiences shouldn’t expect a documentary out of “Richard Jewell.” It’s not a documentary; it’s a dramatization, a docudrama, based on a true story but full of inventions. The “Richard Jewell” poster tells me: “The world will know his name and the truth.” Immediately I assume that to be false. The film, like every biopic ever made, blends fact and fiction, some real characters mixing it up with invented “composites,” for the sake of making the story work the way the director, in this case Clint Eastwood, wants it to work.
According to Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray, and to the historical record, the story went like this: The Atlanta security guard portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser was wrongly suspected by the FBI and smeared by the media as a prime suspect in the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing. He fit the profile: a loner, disgruntled, living with his mother (Kathy Bates). After a brief explosion of media love, followed by three grueling months in the mud pit of wrongful suspicion, Jewell was exonerated. The real terrorist turned out to be another American citizen, Eric Rudolph, whose lethal crimes were motivated by anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. (“Richard Jewell” doesn’t go into any of that.)
With a vicious look in her eyes, Olivia Wilde tears into the role of real-life Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, depicted here as a relentless, voracious “lady reporter” nightmare. She’s eager to sleep with a fictional FBI agent (Jon Hamm) in a textbook definition of quid pro quo: sex for pillow talk, and a hot tip regarding the agency’s No. 1 suspect. One sketchy, weakly sourced A1 story later, Jewell’s image goes from hero to villain in a flash.
Scruggs and other Atlanta reporters, along with the national media piling on, blew it to varying degrees. The stories they wrote and aired leaned dangerously on speculation. The stories were premature, thin and essentially wrong.
With a director less intent on exploiting Scruggs (who died in 2001) as an enemy of the people, symbolizing a profession depicted in “Richard Jewell” as bloodlessly contemptible, the facts would’ve been enough for effective and truthful drama.
On Monday, the Journal-Constitution made public its legal correspondence to Warner Brothers, the studio releasing “Richard Jewell,” demanding a clearer disclaimer regarding dramatic license and the film’s spurious portrayal of Scruggs. The studio doubled down, arguing that “the film is based on a wide range of highly credible source material.”
All this, of course, could’ve been avoided by calling the malignant journalist something other than Kathy Scruggs. Whatever her name, the effect would’ve been the same.
Does “Richard Jewell” paint the unscrupulous FBI characters any more sympathetically? In fact, yes, a little; though the historical record bears out many of the sleazier interrogation tactics depicted in the movie, the Hamm character is allowed his mea culpa moment of self-disgust and disgust toward the reporter-harlot preying on his vulnerabilities.
“Richard Jewell” is far from worthless; the more it spends time with the characters played so well by Hauser, Bates and Sam Rockwell (as Jewell’s attorney), the more effective its polemical focus. (Anyone who tells you the film is apolitical isn’t telling the truth.) Nonetheless: Each line spoken by the movie version of Scruggs conspires to make her a Trumpian run-on sentence fragment: Fake news witch hunt quid pro quo enemy of the people. After Scruggs rushes to judgment with her front page story destroying Jewell’s reputation, there’s a newsroom scene. Scruggs’ fellow staffers stand and applaud. Eastwood’s camera presses in, close, and stays on Wilde’s vicious grin for several seconds. The shot lingers long enough to unify an outraged audience in a single impulse: This woman does not deserve to live.
The media deserves no special treatment or exemption. Like the government, the military and every other flawed institution, public or private, the media knows its share of disgrace, and shoddy methods. “Richard Jewell” has so much to work with, in terms of what really went wrong with Richard Jewell, and how he suffered at the hands of those rushing to suspicion and judgment. I don’t mind that the movie isn’t telling the whole truth. I mind that Eastwood put cheap, sexed-up, demonizing “conflict” ahead of a gripping true story.
PAUL WALTER HAUSER, CENTER, STARS AS THE TITULAR CHARACTER IN “RICHARD JEWELL.”