'Richard Jewell' review: The wrong man

Richard Jewell is a rebuke to institutional arrogance and a defence of individual dignity, sometimes clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly shrewd in its effort to understand its protagonist

On July 27, 1996, a homemade bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, the host city for that year’s Summer Olympics. Two people died and 100 were hurt. It was carried out by an anti-abortion militant named Eric Rudolph.
 
Rudolph’s name is mentioned only near the end of Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood’s new film about the aftermath of the Atlanta bombing. The movie isn’t about the bomber, but rather about the security guard who found a backpack full of explosives and shrapnel under a bench and sounded the alarm. Nonetheless, the spectre of domestic right-wing terrorism haunts the movie, an unseen and unnamed evil tearing at the bright fabric of American optimism.

 
Eastwood, in nearly half a century as a major filmmaker and even longer as an axiom of popular culture, has chronicled the fraying of that cloth, and also plucked at a thread or two. Richard Jewell, with a screenplay by Billy Ray, is one of his more obviously political films, though not always in obvious ways. In spite of some efforts to interpret it as a veiled pro-Trump polemic, the film doesn’t track neatly with current ideological agitations. The political fractures Eastwood exposes are more elemental than even the most ferocious partisanship. This is a morality tale — in a good way, mostly — about the vulnerability of the individual citizen in the face of state power and about the fate of a private person menaced by the machinery of publicity.

 

Though he acts bravely and responsibly at a moment of crisis, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) isn’t entirely a hero. We first meet him about 10 years before the bombing, pushing a cart full of office supplies. That’s where he meets Winston Bryant (Sam Rockwell), an irascible lawyer who will become his champion later on. Jewell is polite, hard-working and prone to surprising, unsolicited acts of generosity. He keeps Bryant’s desk drawer stocked with Snickers bars. At Centennial Olympic Park in 1996, he hands out soft drinks to co-workers, police officers and other thirsty people.
 
There might be something a little peculiar about him. Eastwood, Ray and Hauser (who is nothing short of brilliant) cleverly invite the audience to judge Jewell the way his tormentors eventually will: on the basis of prejudices we might not even admit to ourselves. He’s overweight. He lives with his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates). He has a habit of taking things too seriously and of trying a little too hard to fit in. He treats members of the Atlanta Police Department and the FBI like his professional peers, and seems blind to their condescension. “I’m law enforcement too,” he says to the agents who are investigating him as a potential terrorist, with an earnestness that is both comical and pathetic.

The main heavies are Tom Shaw, a stone-faced FBI man played by Jon Hamm, and Kathy Scruggs, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It’s her reporting that sets off a feeding frenzy in the newspapers and on the airwaves. Scruggs, played by Olivia Wilde, was a real person (she died in 2001). Tom Shaw was not, and the implication that Scruggs had sex with him in exchange for information about the bombing case has no apparent basis in reality. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has threatened legal action against Warner Bros for the way its journalists, Scruggs in particular, are portrayed in the film, and the studio has pushed back. On strictly dramatic grounds, the character is, at best, a collection of lazy, sexist screenwriting clichés.

 
That isn’t so unusual in Hollywood, but what’s worse is that Eastwood and Ray subject Scruggs — depicted as a newsroom mean girl with nothing but scorn for her female colleagues — to a type of profiling analogous to what Jewell endured. Assuming that an ambitious woman journalist must be sleeping with her sources isn’t all that different from assuming that a fat man who lives with his mother must have planted a bomb.
 
The shadows are what linger from this flawed, fascinating movie. As usual with Eastwood, it is shot (by Yves Bélanger) and edited (by Joel Cox) in a clean, blunt, matter-of-fact style. The story moves in a straight line, gathering momentum and suspense even as it lingers over odd, everyday moments. It doesn’t feel especially complicated or textured until it’s almost finished.

 
Richard Jewell is a rebuke to institutional arrogance and a defence of individual dignity, sometimes clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly shrewd and sensitive in its effort to understand its protagonist and what happened to him. The political implications of his ordeal are interesting to contemplate, but its essential nature is clear enough. He was bullied.