Richard Jewell: Clint's powerful tale of real-life rush-to-judgment takes a second to shoot itself in the foot

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

What can you say about a film that tells an amazing story about unlikely heroism and lynching-by-media, but also incidentally betrays everything that story is supposed to teach us?

Narratively speaking, in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, one is a big thing and one is a small thing. But the small thing matters.

The big take on Richard Jewell is particularly relevant today. Jewell was a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta who found a suspicious package during a Games-related concert, convinced various skeptical cops and, after confirmation of a bomb, helped push the crowd far enough behind a perimeter that the subsequent explosion killed two people rather than 100.

Paul Walter Hauser portrays the ordeal of a security guard wrongly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing

So… a hero. Until the FBI decided to follow the notion that the person who found the bomb is likely to be the bomber, in much the same way that a murderer might “find” the body of his victim as a cover. Let’s call it the, “He who smelled it, dealt it,” theory of investigation.

Via the media, the FBI named Jewell as a suspect, taking him from hero to zero in hours. It would be months before the announcement that he was no longer a person of interest. In the interim, his life became a nightmarish media frenzy.

This is the sort of everyman-hero Clint adores. Even more so. Jewell (terrifically played by the criminally underrated Paul Walter Hauser) was an overweight man-child who played arcade games, lived with his mother (Kathy Bates), and kept a gun collection. He aspired to law enforcement (“I study the penal code every night.”) but almost stereotypically became drunk with power whenever that opportunity arose (bullying college kids during his tenure as a campus cop, for example).

But on that one night, he was a hero. It’s kind of a lesson for the cancel-culture if anyone chooses to hear it. Are we to be judged by the best thing we ever did or by the worst? (I’ve read inane social media posts by critics of a political stripe that say this is a movie that glorifies a gun-loving incel).

And though I’m far from a conservative, let’s face it. Historically, Eastwood’s animus against both the FBI and the media is not entirely insupportable. It is a fact of life at all levels of law enforcement that if a suspect is in the cross-hairs, tunnel vision often takes over. In Jewell’s case, even when it was obvious that it was impossible for him to be the guy who called in the bomb threat, the FBI investigators avoided the obvious and concluded via pretzel logic that he must have had an accomplice.

So, here’s the bad thing. In capturing the real event of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution breaking the news of Jewell being a suspect, Clint depicts a real reporter (the late Kathy Scruggs, played by Olivia Wilde) trading sex with an FBI investigator (Jon Hamm) for the literally dirty details. There is no evidence of any kind that this happened. People who knew her are furious. And it’s symptomatic of the fact that virtually every woman this side of Marie Curie who’s accomplished anything has invariably been accused of sleeping her way to the top.

In more than 30 years in newspapers, I’ve never run across any woman reporter who ever operated this way.

(The Journal-Constitution is talking legal action against the studio, both for its depiction of Scruggs and for the suggestion it didn’t properly confirm the Jewell investigation).

So, character assassination is okay if the subject is dead, and she’s a woman. Hey Clint: Movies are media too.

As off-putting as this is (and when I first saw the film, I thought she had to be a fictional character), if you can separate it from the rest of the film, Richard Jewell is a moving, almost Kafka-esque real-life story. Bates is worthy of a supporting-actress Oscar for her unwaveringly supportive mom. Hauser - who previously stole I, Tonya - is all sweaty cognitive dissonance, being tricked and persecuted by the very law enforcement officers he’s always aspired to be. Sam Rockwell is great, as always, as Jewell’s lawyer, a feisty and cynical David fighting a legal and media Goliath.

And as stark a manifesto against rush-to-judgment as his story is, one can’t help but think how much worse Richard Jewell’s ordeal would have been in a social media-driven world.

Richard Jewell. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Billy Ray. Starring Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell and Kathy Bates. Opens wide, Friday, December 13.