OPINION:
“Richard Jewell” is not a particularly good movie. On the Clint Eastwood-as-director scale, with “The Trouble With the Curve” at the bottom, and “Unforgiven” or “The Bridges of Madison County” at the top, “Richard Jewell” rates somewhere around “The Mule” — a competently made but overly long and didactic drama bolstered by strong performances. It’s flabby and suffers for its constrained budget. One scene, which is meant to take place at a crowded Kenny Rogers concert, looks like it has about 30 extras standing around in a field. But Kathy Bates and Paul Walter Hauser, in particular, are superb.
“Richard Jewell” tells a straightforward tale of injustice. Jewell, who died in 2007 at only 44, was a failed police officer (he had lost his job as a deputy sheriff in a small Georgia town) who nonetheless aimed to make a career in law enforcement. During the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, he was hired as an unarmed rent-a-cop. The heavy-set and moustachioed Jewell, at least as Mr. Eastwood presents him, was a Southern-fried Paul Blart.
Until, that is, circumstances made him a hero. It was Jewell who discovered the backpack containing a pipe bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, and it was he who urged the police to investigate it. Bomb-techs quickly discovered the device and began a hasty evacuation of the park, in which Jewell assisted. Only one person was killed by the blast, another by a heart attack he suffered shortly thereafter. Had the evacuation not begun before the bomb blew, thanks to Jewell, many more people undoubtedly would have been killed.
There was no evidence against Jewell — probably because he didn’t do it. (It later emerged that the serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph did.) Nonetheless, the FBI, based on pseudo-scientific “profiling,” determined that he was their man. His name was dutifully leaked to the media, and Jewell’s life — along with his mother’s, with whom he lived — quickly became a living hell.
It is this story that Mr. Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell” tells. It is a “j’accuse” directed, in particular, at the FBI, over misdeeds the bureau committed two decades ago. (By coincidence, I’m just now reading a novel about the Alfred Dreyfuss affair, and some of the similarities in the two cases are striking.)
Because our monomaniacal media can only view the world through Trump-colored glasses, “Richard Jewell” has been recast not as a particular story about a particular series of events, but as Trumpian propaganda.
“Eastwood turns true story into a MAGA rally,” thundered Columbus Alive.
David Edelstein of New York magazine charged that “Eastwood’s mind is marinated in the paranoia and grandiosity of Ayn Rand, for whom extraordinary individuals were reliably under fire by unimaginative government regulators in collusion with the press … Eastwood’s intended audience will respond enthusiastically to the jabs at the government and the elites, who are seen casually lumping the NRA in with ’fringe’ groups.”
Richard Brody of the New Yorker hallucinated that the movie as actually about somebody else altogether. “There is another woman — an ultra-competent and accomplished woman — who’s never mentioned and never seen and yet is obliquely, perhaps unintentionally, implied throughout the movie: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Eastwood has publicly expressed his disdain for her, and I’ve seen suggestions that ’Richard Jewell,’ in its dubious and damning view of the F.B.I. and of journalism, is Trumpist propaganda. Yet I’m aware of only one candidate whose trivial missteps were inflated by the F.B.I. and other government (i.e., Congressional) officials — and amplified by the press — into an issue that threatened to have grave legal consequences for her and that dominated the coverage of a Presidential election,” he wrote.
Even before the movie’s release, media reporters were aghast at Mr. Eastwood’s portrayal of the news media — CNN’s Brian Stelter devoted a segment of his show “Reliable Sources” to bemoaning the film. The media monitors at Poynter suggested that the late reporter Kathy Scruggs was “maligned” in the film — specifically by a strong insinuation that she slept with an FBI source to elicit information.
Yet on closer examination, it seems unlikely that Mr. Stelter and his compatriots (unlike the film critics themselves) actually saw “Richard Jewell” before launching their attacks on it. Indeed, the central reporter character in the film, Kathy Scruggs as portrayed by Olivia Wilde, actually figures out that Jewell is innocent long before the plodding and thuggish FBI does.
Then again, if those journalists condemning it haven’t seen “Richard Jewell,” they’re in good company. The movie made only $5 million on its opening weekend — Mr. Eastwood’s worst opening in decades.
• Ethan Epstein is deputy opinion editor of The Washington Times. Contact him at eepstein@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @ethanepstiiiine.
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