Review: "Richard Jewell" Finds Humanity in a Cynical World

Scene from Richard Jewell

In a career full of depicting everyday heroes, director Clint Eastwood has never found one as every day as Richard Jewell. In the past decade, his heroes have been F.B.I. agents (J. Edgar), airplane pilots (Sully), soldiers (American Sniper) and even elderly drug mules (The Mule). There's plenty that makes it an exciting cinema but by no means a perfect reflection of the type of people who come to Eastwood movies, looking for justice to prevail in an unjust society. In the case of Richard Jewell, a man obsessed with becoming a police officer and follows the code to an egregiously formal display, he has someone who isn't photogenic nor has a charisma to handle the press that is thrust his way following one incident of selfless heroism. For Eastwood's latest, he has gone beyond the extraordinary and is now captivated by the ordinary. What makes the world turn on Jewell? It's a heartbreaking story and one that finds the director creating a narrative against the media in an attempt to find where society's cynicism comes from. It's safe to say that even with Eastwood quickly approaching 90, he still has the chops to entertain with a sharp commentary that stings with relevance.

As a Hollywood movie, there's something unsuspecting about Paul Walter Hauser getting to be the lead in any movie. As an overweight man, he's often reduced to sidekick roles, paying a doofus who compliments his more handsome friends. That's how his career has been, even at his best in BlacKkKlansman and other 90's Olympics scandal drama I, Tonya. That is part of the brilliance of Richard Jewell, which is based on finding someone who looks like a bit of a loner, unable to be the handsome hero that nobody would suspect. Jewell is a man who is constantly said to "look like a terrorist," and it's easy to see why. Jewell lives with his mom (Kathy Bates) and has a love of knowledge regarding law safety and, in a move that bites him early in the story, a dense awareness with how bombs are made. By all accounts, his dream of being in law enforcement feels predicated from his first scene where he befriends an Attorney (Sam Rockwell) for being nice and upfront with his nobility.

Those early minutes create a strong bias for Jewell that makes the remaining minutes feel more heartbreaking. There are things that the audience is privy to that none of the media will find out until the closing act. The scene where he discovers the bomb plays out like an act of heroism as he wanders around an Atlanta concert venue asking people to disperse for fear of being injured. Supporting cast members, including an F.B.I. agent (Jon Hamm) that sees events go down but still is hellbent on finding him guilty. There's little to suggest that he's guilty, but this is a story akin to a crime mystery from the inside out. The audience knows that Jewell is innocent, but how do you convince the world that he is? Everybody has their eyes on him now. The media (notably Olivia Wilde's Kathy Scruggs) plants a case against him. Why? Because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, it was the right time because he saved lives, but why punish a man for doing so?

That is the major obstacle. With cameras running on Jewell's front lawn and the F.B.I. doing everything in their power to incriminate him with manipulated evidence, it is a destruction of character. What proof do these people have? It's more of a hunch to expect the worse, especially since Jewell is a character who looks odd by virtue of being overweight. His knowledge of explosives is also suspicious, though isn't that just an extension of being in law enforcement? How does he have any credulity when this is all over? So much of the film rests in Hauser's incredible gift for capturing Jewell's insular fear. The fact that he rambles on too long reflects his insecurity as he loses eye contact when he knows that the worst is about to come. He has no way of getting out of this trap, and it's painful. It's a performance that works because of how much it lacks flourish. It's a man not groomed for media having to paint himself as innocent. He's not an actor. He doesn't know how to fake his way into an innocent verdict. He has to rely on the sympathy that doesn't come.

Rockwell's Attorney is another great performance that gives the film a strategic way to save Jewell against the media. In a role that mixes casual confrontation with decisive law strategy, he is the person likely to keep Jewell out of jail simply because he believes his innocence. Considering that he spends half of the film wearing shorts, there is something almost too casual to him that makes him endearing to viewers, reflecting a side of the law that isn't often depicted on screen. Even as he grows weary from a client who can't help but self-destruct with his naive niceness, he manages to rile up Jewell, finding his deeper insecurity as he tries to find last-ditch efforts to get out of this alive. On the other side is a somewhat more problematic character of Wilde's Scruggs, whose first scene begins with a commentary on her breasts before proceeding to be the antagonist who is almost mustache-twirling sinister at points. By the end when Attorney yells her down however, it goes beyond the caricature of a shrill woman wanting to take down a man and becomes an attack on her. Yes, it's supposed to be more a commentary on media, but Eastwood's flaw is making the attack so much about her as a person that it becomes sexist in a film that paints Jewell's side as altruistic and everyone else as evil.

What gives Richard Jewell and credulity is Eastwood's ability to reflect how an innocent man is painted as evil by virtue of looking the wrong way. It helps that Hauser does not look like a man who can sell a film, meaning that the content speaks for itself, and does so as the film watches him fall apart. He needs to get this behind him. At that moment, Eastwood has gone beyond extraordinary archetypes that crowd his recent filmography and finds the humanity of a man who has been falsely accused. It's a reflection of personal bias that is undeniable and tragic, especially with constant reference to where the bomber may strike next. This satisfaction of bullying Jewell into a guilty verdict is illogical once everyone knows how much he believes in everyone following the law. He's even lost a few jobs because of how closely he takes code. If nothing else is learned from the film, it's the feeling that facts need to be taken into account before judging someone. What happened to Jewell was all speculation, and nobody came out a winner because of that.

The miracle of latter-day Eastwood is his ability to understand humanity at its core. While there are some aspects that are narratively flawed (the Kathy Scruggs characterization), he still comes out wanting to believe in good. He wants to look beyond the idea of a corrupt system and find the senes that things can change for the better. He doesn't give in to the cynicism that is lobbied at Jewell for most of the film. He is looking to get beyond it, albeit with some sentimentality thrown in for good measure. The results are effective if at times conventional, finding a way to tell a story that feels just as relevant now as it did when the events happened. The media is still getting things wrong. It's important to correct them without damning it to a state of irrelevance. Richard Jewell is the search for truth in public perception, and it's hopefully a message that is heard loud and clear.