Richard Jewell (2019)

Review

131min

Genre:       Fact-based, Crime, Drama

Director:     Clint Eastwood

Cast:         Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde…and more

Writers:     Billy Ray, Marie Brenner, Kent Alexander… and more

-Synopsis-

During the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, a humble Georgia security guard becomes an instant hero when he saves scores of people from a pipe bomb planted at a park music event, only to be thrown into turmoil when unjustly fingered by authorities and a ravenous media as the prime suspect, in this latest biographical drama and true American tale from Clint Eastwood.

Perhaps it’s a natural evolution as a filmmaker, perhaps a result of his personal politics, or maybe it’s just a reflective period of a life which has seen the world drastically change throughout half of the 20^th century and well into the 21^st, but this later stage of Eastwood’s long and storied career as a director and screen icon has been defined by dramatic tellings of extraordinary and timely true stories. From decorated controversial American army snipers and heroic commercial pilots, to off-duty hero soldier train passengers and unlikely American geriatric Mexican drug cartel mules, the veteran director has focused his lens on real Americans who’ve grabbed the headlines. And now Clint turns back the clock to tell a stranger than fiction, only in America tale which truly says something about the ‘land of the free’.

Paul Walter Hauser stars as thirty-something wannabe law enforcer Richard Jewell, an idealistic security guard working odd jobs while harbouring police enforcement ambitions, living with his ageing mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) and going nowhere fast. When a temp job at a music gig at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is unexpectedly targeted by an unknown domestic bomber, Richard becomes the subject of national news and a major FBI investigation when he discovers the device and helps to save countless lives. But he quickly goes from overnight national hero to villain when jaded agent ‘Tom Shaw’ (Jon Hamm) and an overzealous FBI mistakenly fingers him for the crime, and relentless unscrupulous local reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) leads a ravenous media who turn him into the prime suspect. Forcing him to turn to former boss and maverick local estate lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) for legal counsel, as they team up to resist the might of the media and a federal government looking for an easy culprit—as their lives are torn apart and his faith in law and order is left shaken.

It’s hard to deny that we live in tense troubled times which leave many reconsidering the relationship between the American government and the citizens it supposedly serves, or taking a sober look at the nature of the media and the first amendment which protects them, but the fact that Eastwood and his writers can step back twenty-four years and still make the same case with a very personal story is telling, and a real world reflection of the perennial complexities of democracy.

Yet ‘Richard Jewell’ is at its heart a classic American character story of an everyman in extraordinary circumstances, which then turns into a timeless tale of a man against the world, with a mild-mannered, slightly naïve southern boy at its core. An aspiring cop with a photographic memory and a keen eye for detail but too many quirks and neither the physique nor the personality to make it—a polite good ole boy with too much reverence for authority, about to be ground up by the gears of the federal government machine.

It’s no surprise then that this human story is carried on the shoulders of its eponymous figure and its star Paul Walter Hauser, whom after quirkily stealing scenes in supporting roles as questionable characters in films like ‘I, Tonya’ and ‘BlacKkKlansman’, takes centre stage with a performance full of charm, foibles and humour but with pathos and melancholy too. One which in a weaker year for leading performances might have been recognised more this awards season, but is sure to take his career to a new level.

Luckily for him and us though ‘Richard Jewell’ happens to feature one of the best ensemble casts assembled by Cint Eastwood since ‘Unforgiven’, giving Hauser the chance to share the load with several accomplished supporting stars who catch the eye, most notably in his copious chemistry with the singular and always excellent Sam Rockwell as his blunt and weary attorney and confidant, a relationship which blesses the film with earthy levity and unexpected levels of humour. Meanwhile as Jewell’s loving but suffering elderly mother, screen legend Kathy Bates is superb and truly the heart of the piece, a personification of the human cost of a ravenous media and a callous federal government, in a performance as good as any female supporting turn in the last year.

Yet it’s one of the film’s characters itself which has brought some predictable outrage to the film’s doorstep, specifically the depiction of Olivia Wilde’s unscrupulous over-sexualised reporter character, which some have branded as sexist in the #MeToo era. But it’s the height of irony and lack of self-awareness that Kathy Scruggs and her defenders would complain about her depiction in a dramatization of this story, especially considering what she in particular and the press in general actually did to Richard Jewell himself—as Eastwood rises above the so-called controversy to give the media a taste of their own medicine, with a recent past justice tale for this post-truth era.

The Bottom Line…

A charming and moving classic American stranger-than-fiction human drama and everyman hero story which turns to the recent past to tell a tale rooted in the present, with ‘Richard Jewell’ the great Clint Eastwood proves that even in his ninetieth year he’s as relevant and sure-footed as ever with one his finest films in recent memory—delivering a scathing cinematic indictment of the media and government bureaucracy which continues to chew up real lives and spit them out.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

Sully: Miracle On The Hudson (2016)

Clint Eastwood directs and Tom Hanks stars in a biographical drama about one fateful event in the life of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger; the veteran US Airways pilot who saved 155 lives when he made an emergency landing of his crippled Airbus on New York’s Hudson River after it was struck by a flock of birds in 2009, and as a result became an unwilling accidental hero and global overnight celebrity, with all the pitfalls trappings that come with it.

Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart and Laura Linney among others.

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