Since I assume this will relight the ResetERA.com fires:
https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/richard-jewell-movie-review-clint-eastwood-true-story.htmlRichard Jewell Turns a True Story Into a Libertarian Fable
Clint Eastwood’s new movie makes boogeymen of the government and the media.
Jewell was a victim—of the FBI’s sloppy zeal to catch the criminal, of a merciless media spotlight, and, in Eastwood’s retelling, of his own delusions of grandeur. Played by Paul Walter Hauser (who portrayed similar fantasy-prone mouth-breathers in I, Tonya and BlacKkKlansman), the fictional Jewell does himself no favors by, as one character puts it, “looking like the kind of guy who might set off a bomb.” But despite its conventional framing, Richard Jewell feels less like a biopic than an assertion of a worldview—a Reaganite one in which the most dangerous threats to well-meaning, ordinary-ish white guys like Jewell are big government and an unscrupulous media. The film’s smartest character, Jewell’s eventual lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), boasts a decidedly pre-9/11 poster in his office: “I fear government more than I fear terrorism.” When his Russian-accented assistant (Nina Arianda) muses, “Where I come from, when the government says someone’s guilty, that’s how you know they’re innocent,” you know they’re a match made in libertarian heaven. Meanwhile, the fumbling feds are represented by a pompous FBI agent (Jon Hamm, dripping with Don Draper–ish disdain), who’s more than willing to break the law himself to pin the blame on Jewell.
The government gets off relatively easy compared to the fourth estate, the worst of which is distilled into the vampiric newspaperwoman Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), who nearly makes Jake Gyllenhaal’s monstrous antihero in Nightcrawler look tame.
Richard Jewell doesn’t make this connection, but in another life, its protagonist could’ve been a Kathy Scruggs—someone whose need for drama and attention was actually paired, however tenuously at times, to talent and discipline. Without blaming Jewell himself for the FBI’s focus on him, the film makes law enforcement’s initial concerns about him understandable. In an early scene, he’s fired from a campus security guard job for cracking down on underage drinking with a fanatic’s devotion—and that’s after he’s caught pulling over cars by impersonating a police officer.
It doesn’t help his case that he’s a spottily employed 33-year-old living with his mother (Kathy Bates, excellent in her few scenes) with a vast firearms collection. (It’s Georgia, he shrugs.) Jewell’s eagerness to cooperate with the FBI—he’s in law enforcement too, he can’t help telling them—leaves him vulnerable to the federal agents’ off-book schemes to get him to confess. His grandiosity also makes the epilogue, in which we find out that he fulfilled his lifelong goal of joining a police department, not exactly the happy ending the filmmakers want to sell us.
But if the feds can’t imagine that Jewell doesn’t lead a second life as a domestic terrorist, Eastwood and Ray have apparent difficulty envisioning an inner life for their protagonist. Perhaps that’s why the film plays out as a tidily concocted buddy drama, with Watson teaching Jewell how to be more skeptical toward the men he’s idolized his entire life (especially when they’re after him) and Jewell demonstrating to his grouchy lawyer that you don’t have to settle under a black cloud just because the world is unfair. The filmmakers display hardly any interest in Watson’s efforts to exonerate his client, which the lawyer handily accomplishes with next to no effort.
More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.
This reviewer knows absolutely nothing about the case. The "lawyer ... accomplishes with next to no effort" because Jewell was
never even charged and the FBI never stated he was a suspect. (Although it did publicly proclaim he was not a target of investigation and Janet fucking Reno apologized for the leak.) Jewell did however win
multiple judgments against media outlets, including the original paper that named him via "leak" as a suspect and claimed he fit an unsourced profile, because they all absent any law enforcement sources dug into his life and showed how it fit the "profile" of other bombers. The media absolutely went after Jewell harder than the government who apparently should not be blamed either even though they went out of their way to apologize for it all? Plus Jewell DID cooperate with the FBI because he DID want to become a police officer, although he adamantly refused to confess. So this review is complaining that the film was too accurate to events?
