Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 2019)

In a terrific capsule review of Richard Jewell for the Chicago Reader, Kathleen Sachs claims that "Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now. Not the greatest, mind you, just the most." By this, I take it Sachs means that Eastwood's films don't sway decisively in one ideological direction. In Richard Jewell, he seems to have a readymade story to propagate right-wing ideologies. Jewell was the security guard who discovered the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The FBI quickly targeted Jewell as a prime suspect and the media proceeded to investigate his potential culpability. Jewell was exonerated while the real bomber would evade capture for seven years. Some critics have thus read Richard Jewell as a right-wing primer on fake news and how government institutions fail the individual.

The first quarter of Richard Jewell, however, paints the protagonist as a George Zimmerman type who constantly oversteps his bounds as a security guard at Piedmont College. An ineffectual bully who hungers for more power than his rent-a-cop status affords, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, jaw-dropping) comes off more as a dangerous crank than any kind of hero. So however heroic his actions were at Centennial Olympic Park, they are already filtered through this most unheroic portrait. Had Eastwood intended to uphold Richard Jewell as a martyr, he failed. 

This is why I don't have as much of a problem as other critics do with the more cartoonish portrayals. Most damningly, Eastwood commits the same error as the media did with Jewell by falsely fashioning Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) into a vixen eager to exchange sexual favors for information from the purely evil FBI composite character Agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm, oily). And few critics have mentioned how Eastwood transforms Piedmont College Raymond Cleere (Charles Green) into a symbol for an effete higher-education system that cares more for its boozing privileged students than its hard-working staff (not faculty). But none of these performances render Jewell any more a hero.

Because, of course, Eastwood never intended to conceive of him so unambiguously in the first place. As the most American director working right now, he's asking audiences if this type of person deserves due process. Is he innocent before proven guilty? Does this person who consistently makes stupid decisions (Richard Jewell is frequently an uneasy comedy) earn our compassion? Framing these questions is a masterful mise-en-scène that always reminds us about exactly the kind of person we're contemplating here. Richard Jewell explodes with props that lend savor to the frame (Sirk would be proud): underwear, Tupperware, TV sets, guns and more guns, etc. A poster in Watson Bryant's (Sam Rockwell), Jewell's attorney, office reads: "I fear government more than I fear terrorism." Confederate flags stand witness to Bobi's (Kathy Bates, almost as jaw-dropping as Hauser), Jewell's mother, plea to the media to exonerate her son. 

Allow me to quote Sachs' line in full. "For better or worse—some will say better, many more will say worse—Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now." What Eastwood is asking us to do in Richard Jewell is to imagine ourselves in a position opposite to our own or perhaps others heretofore unforeseen. How will a black viewer receive Bobi's tearful plea? How will a NRA member take those early scenes at Piedmont College? I cried at the final title informing us that Bobi watches Bryant's children every weekend just like I cried at Eastwood's song at the end of Gran Torino. But I'm crying again right now because these are the people who probably voted for Trump last night. On November 4, 2020, I can't think of anything more American than that, for better or worse.

Grade: A