There are a lot of movies that will outrage you this holiday season, and Richard Jewell is right up there.
Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort is based on the true story of the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta that killed two people and injured more than one hundred. Richard Jewell was a security guard at the site who was originally treated as a hero for being the first to find the bomb, saving countless others. But, soon after his glory — and for no reason based on facts — he became the prime suspect in the case, vilified by a press hungry for a villain.
Paul Walter Hauser, who you may remember as the idiotic bodyguard in I, Tonya, nails it as Richard Jewell. He takes a character who lives with his mother, has an overactive imagination and could easily be a stereotype and gives him real complexity.
Sam Rockwell is equally good as the attorney who takes on Jewell’s case. Cynical and impatient, the two become an unlikely team in the fight to clear Jewell.
The story is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that fake news is what ruined Jewell’s life. And this was before Fox News even existed.
The only thing that takes the movie down (and rightly so) is the source of the real-life controversy that now surrounds it. For whatever reason, Eastwood decided to portray Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) — the reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who made up broke the story of Jewell as a suspect — as someone who slept with an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) to get the exclusive.
The newspaper claims this is false and has demanded a disclaimer. It’s too bad that Eastwood chose to go that way because the story was riveting enough without adding a woman sleeping her way to success — which has now eclipsed the actual movie.
It will be interesting to see if the same issue that destroyed Jewell’s life will destroy the movie’s box office appeal.
Leave a Reply