With Richard Jewell Clint Eastwood Takes the Past to Look at Today

Clint Eastwood established himself as a film director of not a long time ago. He’s never been the greatest of actors even if he might be one of greatest living movie stars but as a director Eastwood, no matter who admired and respected always seems to also be underestimated. Famous for usually coming in on or under budget and on schedule, I sometimes suspect it is this skill of his that that tends to compel critics to dismiss him as a truly great director. Of course, his extensive filmography as a director is filled with pulpy b-movies beyond his truly great ones.

For every Play Misty for Me and The Outlaw Josey Wales there is The Gauntlet, Heartbreak Ridge, Firefox and Sudden Impact. Every Bird was buried in between The Rookie, Absolute Power and Space Cowboys . Unforgiven followed by Bloodwork, but as he aged there was less and less of the pulpy films and more and more of the thoughtful ruminations, the timely commentaries and even pulp done as art. Eastwood’s latest, Richard Jewell comes in the Age of Trump and offers up a historical account that is a striking metaphor for what is happening today.

Richard Jewell, is a wannabe police officer who finds himself stuck as a security guard. An overweight and not especially bright man, Jewell easily represents not so much Trump as he is, but more the Trump a mainstream media and deep state bureaucrats insist on seeing him. While Richard Jewell is the eponymous title, this film is much more about Jewell’s detractors and his supporters. There is the establishment who sees him as a man too dimwitted to be a mastermind and yet obviously guilty despite few facts supporting such a presumption. Then there are his supporters who must struggle to reign in and ultimately work around the dumb things he say’s and does.

Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) was a security guard working at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia when he discovered a suspicious backpack suspiciously left behind underneath a bench. He informed police and the backpack was soon identified to be a bomb. Because of Hauser’s diligent work that day, countless lives were saved while two people tragically died. The FBI, as a matter of course first eyed Jewell as a suspect and never really looked at anyone else as a suspect. When an FBI agent leaks that Jewell is the prime suspect to a reporter for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution Jewell finds his life upended.

Eastwood, working with a screenplay by Billy Ray first shows us Jewell working as supply clerk for a law firm and who is befriended by attorney Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell). Shortly after Jewell gains employment with Piedmont College as a security guard but (tellingly) is let go for multiple complaints of Jewell acting outside the scope of his jurisdiction. Losing his job compels him to move back in with his mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) where he finally, and with great frustration, secures a security guard job for the upcoming Olympics.

Jon Hamm is FBI Agent Tom Shaw who has been assigned to work the Olympics and begrudgingly does. It wasn’t, however, Agent Shaw who found the deadly explosives but instead and in his eyes, the less than qualified Jewell who becomes the hero. It’s not that Eastwood and Ray even intimate that Shaw was jealous of Jewell and for that reason smeared him as being the bomber. It is common practice among law enforcement officers to look at as a suspect the one who finds such explosive devices first.

In fairness to Shaw, there are other characteristics about Jewell that tend to fit the profile of an extremist who might do such a thing. These characteristics are largely circumstantial, not to mention characteristics grossly exaggerated by Shaw and the FBI. Jewell is simply misunderstood by those suspicious of him. When Shaw is approached by Atlanta-Journal reporter Kathy Scruggs at a bar, pumping him for information that might make a compelling story, Eastwood and Ray do intimate that Scruggs offered Shaw sex for a lead and Shaw gave her Jewell. The Atlanta-Journal has been very vocal in their displeasure with the filmmakers over this intimation and have demanded an apology.

Scrugss died of a prescription drug overdose in 2001 and is not alive today to defend herself, is not just presented as a solicitous reporter but a sloppy one as well. She does some research but only superficially, satisfying herself that the seemingly dimwitted and overweight security guard that still lives with his mother fit the description of someone who would plant a bomb and the Atlanta-Journal decide to run with her story. Without knowing that the story has been published and now national news networks are running with that story, Jewell agrees to meet with the FBI for an interview.

The proclivity to go after Catholic school boys and presuming them guilty because they wore MAGA hats is really nothing new. Accountability journalism began long before the Age of Trump and don’t let the ‘firefighters’ fool you, the media doesn’t need the villain to be powerful in order to go after them. As long as they think they’ve found someone they can hold accountable, facts be damned they’re running with it, and in 1996 they ran with it nearly destroying an innocent man’s life.

Far from it being the media alone who bungled this story, the FBI, all too often and inexplicably portrayed by media as upright and respectable, proudly maintained their bungled story even after they begrudgingly admitted Jewell was no longer officially a suspect. Jon Hamm does a nice job of bringing some humanity to an otherwise cad of an agent. Sloppy in his investigation and intent on clinging to his bias, Tom Shaw is all too willing to use the awesome machinery of the feds brought down upon a little guys head.

Sam Rockwell is always great and doesn’t disappoint here as Bryant the almost Trumpian like working class lawyer who along with a very fine Hauser as Jewell, bravely face the swamp and do what they can in their own way to drain it. Bryant is continually faced with being bombarded by both the FBI and the media about facts Jewell himself never disclosed, or with pleading desperately for Jewell to just keep his mouth shut and let him do his job. Jewell will nod his head in agreement and then turn around and speak up and to often in cringe like ways.

It is hard to imagine that this is all just accidental similarities to Trump, his supporters and the swamp he faces, especially coming from a well established director who’s reached a status impervious to any criticisms that might be made for the similarities. There are so many stark contrasts between the little guys and establishment. The moral relativism of a media (and this might by why Ray decided to have Scruggs (played by Olivia Wilde) solicit a story by offering sex) and of short sighted bureaucrats vs the simpler lives of ordinary people dedicated to family.

Kathy Bates is yet another actor who always great and her turn as Richard Jewell’s mother Bobi is rich with adoration for her son mixed with the anxiety of watching him being railroaded by powerful cabals. Eastwood doesn’t always hit the ball out of the ballpark but with Richard Jewell he’s hit the magical kind of home-run Robert Redford’s Roy Cobb would in The Natural. He has made a film that looks into our past to better understand our present today.