Richard Jewell (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

I’d about given up on Eastwood as a director; the workmanlike ethic he inherited from Don Siegel had become too dominant, his work disavowing any stylistic flourish. I don't mind him bringing his politics to the screen, but I felt he had lost his spark. His film about the Hudson Bay plane landing, SULLY, was in dire need of more complexity and a third act, yet it won plaudits, presumably because of Hanks' charm and the event itself, which needed celebrating in some way. But Sully had me giving up. I felt Eastwood had tired of the game. I never watched THE MULE.

And then along came RICHARD JEWELL.

JEWELL works so well because Eastwood, while denying the camera, cinematography, and editing the right to flourish, created an environment where his cast could. Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, John Hamm and Olivia Wilde are excellent, especially Bates as Richard's mom, who got herself an Oscar nomination, while the relatively unknown Paul Thomas Hauser as the title character gives a "performance of a lifetime."

Richard Jewell is a simple, milquetoast, mustache-sporting, obese man with a gun collection, who idolises police officers, the idea of authority and of law enforcement. He lives with his mom and works as a security guard. He wants to be a cop. He'll never make it. He doesn't have the smarts.

While on security duty at an Atlanta Olympics music concert, he spots a suspicious backpack that has been left near the crowd. The regular cops tell him not to worry about it, it's probably some kids who forgot their beer. But Richard being Richard insists the backpack be examined. The reluctant cops discover it contains three large pipe bombs. Richard and the cops work to get the crowds away but the bomb detonates. Two people are killed. Many more fatalities would have occurred had Richard not acted. However, Richard finds himself a suspect because he fits the FBI profile of a "lone hero bomber", a “single, frustrated white guy, who lives at home with his mom and dreams of being a cop.” The kind of guy who plants bombs in public in order to save people, so as to be seen as a hero.

A reporter, played by Olivia Wilde, induces the lead FBI guy, John Hamm, with the promise of sex and gets him to tell her the name of their lead suspect. She writes the story. Frontpage of the Atlanta Journal. Suddenly, the man hailed as a national hero is the nation's number one villain. Richard calls the only lawyer he knows, from his time in the past working as the office mailman at a law firm. The lawyer, played by Sam Rockwell, steps into the fray...

Paul Thomas Hauser manages to portray Richard Jewell with dignity and truth, while never letting go of the man's simplicity. It's a tough role to essay and it could have been condescending. It isn't.

Where the film really comes to life is in the relationship between Hauser's Jewell and Rockwell's sassy, cynical lawyer. Their scenes galvanise the story, and play into and energise the characters close to Jewell: his mom; the lawyer's female assistant, suspicious of government motives; Richard's friend, accused of being his accomplice and lover. Eastwood excels at marshaling his cast and getting the best out of them.

He often places his characters in natural light. Frequently Jewell is lit from behind by a soft light so that his face is in semi-shadow. Any regular director would at least have a reflector bouncing some light back onto the face, if not a fill to give it definition. Not Eastwood, and this natural approach adds something to the story being told.

The director allows himself one flourish when the camera lingers for a beat on the large FBI crest decal on a glass door, just after Jewell passes through, having been stripped of his belief in the authority of law enforcement. We are viewing the crest from behind and it reads back to front. Like Jewell’s worldview, it has been flipped. It's a nice touch.

Where the film has fallen into trouble and may explain the Academy’s reluctance to nominate it widely, is in the portrayal of the journalist, Kathy Scruggs. Olivia Wilde's character. Wilde gives a good performance but her old newspaper and her ex-colleagues have protested about the character offering sex for information. They say that wasn't Scruggs. Complaints about the portrayal have attracted a disproportionate amount of press attention, partly because journalists are keen to protect their own. The Scruggs story and the aftermath of the Jewell case is fascinating in itself and could carry its own movie. (Scruggs went into a downward spiral after the national story broke and died by overdose in 2001.)

The emphasis here, though, should be on Jewell, his loss of innocence, the loss of his proud belief in authority, and the cost of those losses to America.

RICHARD JEWELL is a good film with remarkable performances and is a return to form for Eastwood.