For most of the back half of the 2010s, Clint Eastwood has explored American notions of heroism, with varying degrees of success. There were the half-baked experiments (The 15:17 to Paris), the financially-successful failures (American Sniper), the examinations of his own on-screen legacy (The Mule), and the fundamentally-sound explorations of professionalism under fire (Sully). It’s fitting, then, that Eastwood would exit what might be the final decade of his filmmaking career with Richard Jewell, about the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and its aftermath, and it’s a movie that seems to wholly encapsulate his views on homegrown, graceful valiance. It’s a film that directly echoes some of his forbearers — Frank Capra, especially, in its view of the small man standing up to the overwhelming and corrupt forces in his way — and often finds potency in its understated sweetness and goodwill, though it does contain a tragic and easily avoidable flaw that adds a bitterness to the mixture.
Each character in Richard Jewell is unsatisfied with their station in life, with Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) himself being the most obvious example, a former sheriff’s deputy who has found himself working as a security guard thanks to his somewhat overzealous commitment to “doing the right thing.” An early scene shows him being fired from a campus police job after pulling over drunken students on the highway, where he has no jurisdiction, as he took the dean’s message of preventing “Mickey Mouse bullshit” on his campus — delivered to the guard as light chatter at a fundraiser months earlier — to heart. His job at the Olympics, he hopes, will put him back in the running for other jobs in law enforcement, and his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates), whom Richard lives with, knows that her son will find something eventually. Also on the side of the law is FBI Special Agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), who is likewise frustrated by his Olympics assignment, as he could be out in the field doing bigger and better things rather than monitoring the crowd at a Kenny Rogers show. The two are in the crowd that fateful night when a man leaves a bag full of pipe bombs under a bench that Richard is responsible for overseeing.
For those still unconvinced of Eastwood’s sturdiness behind the camera in his autumn years, the sequence of the bombing itself should offer proof that the master never left the building. Sure, The Mule did the same last year, but the first half-hour of Richard Jewell is a masterclass in building palpable tension, even when the audience knows what’s going to happen. There’s a swell fake-out that comes before it, done to reinforce the fact that Jewell’s sixth sense could often misfire, and that “crying wolf” overzealousness does come back to haunt him, slightly. His pacing, which is almost glacial, drips with dread, and his shot selection is often impeccable, as he carefully emphasizes the geography of the scene so that we understand just how devastating this could have been, had not Jewell intervened. In the aftermath, the guard is rightfully celebrated as a hero, presented to the press by the corporation he’d been contracted through perhaps just a little too early on in the process. But Shaw feels burned by this — it was his park, after all, and dammit, he is an FBI agent who should have seen this coming — and through a combination of traditional procedure and his own arrogance, begins to investigate Jewell.
It’s here where screenwriter Billy Ray does something nearly unforgivable: He comes very, very close to slandering journalist Kathy Scruggs, played here by Olivia Wilde, who wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was instrumental in leaking Jewell’s identity as a suspect to the public in the aftermath of the bombing. Now, it is pretty much universally agreed upon that Scruggs and the AJC did wrong in revealing this information, and the film would have been just as strong if it stuck to the facts of the case. But Ray, for whatever reason, has decided to portray her as a shrew unsatisfied with her station, who has sex with her sources in order to get a leg above. Scruggs is given somewhat of a redemption arc, in which she realizes the enormity of her mistake, but the damage is honestly done by the end of the first insinuation that Wilde and Hamm fuck. Whether it’s the writer giving into his impulse for vengeance, i.e., wronging this woman in the same way that she wronged Jewell; a metaphor, of government and the media literally being in bed together, proving to be too potent for him to resist; or simply the plucky reporter cliche taken to its modern logical end (perhaps best fitting given Eastwood’s Capra-esque sensibilities here), make no mistake: It is wrong.
Anyway, thanks to Shaw and Scruggs, soon the entire world knows that Richard is the focus of the Government’s investigation, and he’s soon swarmed by reporters and FBI agents, each of whom think he’s guilty as hell. After seeming to incriminate himself three or four times, the walls slowly start to close in, and the pressure begins to mount on the family. Needing help, Richard reaches out to the only lawyer that he knows, Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), a tough-talking motherfucker who formerly worked as an attorney with the Small Business Administration back when Jewell staffed the supply room. The two formed a slight friendship there, and Rockwell and Hauser’s rapport feels natural as if the two actually shared this history together. His shift into private practice has proved fruitless, but when he gets the call from his old friend, Bryant leaps into action, both out of his own pragmatism and his sense of justice. It seems as if he’s the only person in the Jewells’ corner, as they’re wholly unprepared for the slings and arrows thrown at them; subject to both the prying eyes of the national press and the indignities of the FBI’s investigation (hair-sample plucking, a search of their residence and the seizure of Mama Jewell’s things). Bryant convinces the Jewells, who fear the government and law enforcement as much as they do God, to go on the offensive, and attempt to clear Richard’s name. What follows is satisfying, though it is a bit tainted by Ray’s indulgence.
Yet, despite the writer’s best efforts to sink the picture in the writing process and Eastwood’s faithfulness in bringing it to the screen, Richard Jewell still works brilliantly, thanks to this cast and the director’s reliable and sturdy guidance. It’s a careful blend of comedy and pathos, echoing Eastwood’s tonal sensibility in The Mule, though, in practice, it’s at times closer to a Richard Linklater picture. I often thought of Bernie while watching this film, though they’re very different in practice and in telling. The big names in the cast have begun to attract all of the attention like dry sponges left in small pools of water, with Rockwell and Bates already getting pushed for nominations. But, in reality, it’s Hauser who makes the whole thing come together, and God bless Jonah Hill for not taking the part, though he is a credited producer here. Hauser embodies Jewell enough here that Eastwood feels comfortable using the actual Jewell in certain archival footage without any fissures in the film’s verisimilitude, but the performance, unlike so many others that are receiving plaudits this winter, goes above and beyond mere impression. So much of the film’s tone depends on his genuine sweetness, as the humor would come off mean-spirited if not for his light touch, and his kindness helps to soften some of Eastwood’s rougher edges. In the process, he transforms what many feared, at least from the advertising, to be yet another list of conservative grievances into something appealing to all: A celebration of the kind-hearted and capable, no matter how small, in spite of the powerful forces that would keep them from doing their good or receiving credit for their actions.