Richard Jewell (15.)
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
Starring Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates and Nina Arianda. 131 mins.
It's come to something when even playing the title character doesn't get you top billing. Richard Jewell (Hauser) was a security guard who during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics noticed a suspicious package and saved countless lives in the Centennial Park bombings. A morbidly obese oddball, Jewell goes from hero to villain when the FBI (Hamm) tell the press (Wilde) that he is their prime suspect, simply because he fits their profile as a lone bomber. (They'd probably been watching too much Cracker – it was massive back then.) It seems very unfair, and very unClint, that in the credits Hauser is listed after all the name actors; especially as his performance is just about the only one in the film that seems real.
You really believe in Hauser's Jewell and his pathetic attempts to assist the FBI because “he's law enforcement too.” Everybody else, (except Bates as his mother), is playing a movie figure. Rockwell is the quirky, offbeat movie lawyer determined to defend him, Hamm is just a smarmy villain.
There has been much moaning about the lack of diversity in Hollywood but for a supposedly liberal closed shop, it has a lot of time for registered Republican Eastwood. He may have empty chaired Obama at their convention but in LA he is seen as a free-thinking libertarian, a reasonable and balanced conservative. He regularly works with the town's most liberal figures and often gets them an Oscar or at least a nomination. Last year's The Mule, in which he played an elderly man delivering drugs for Mexican cartels, managed to embrace all shades of thought from Build-that-wall to Black Lives Matter.
Richard Jewell though is a rather crude piece. As Kathy Scruggs, the journalist that sleeps with the FBI to get the story, Olivia Wilde is shot to look as skanky as possible. The camera makes sure you get the bags under her eyes and her bad skin, while she is written to be charmless and grating in all her doings. It's a real hatchet job on a woman who died in 2001.
Jewell is an innocent, good-hearted, white working-class man who is looked down on and persecuted by The Establishment, simply because he is a single, white, working-class man. To save him, his lawyer has to browbeat him out of his instinctive deference to authority. It's a story of a grassroots patriot learning to distrust the state. Though Eastwood's low key style goes a long way in disguising it, this is straight down the line Trump deep state/ fake news hysteria; yet it has producer credits for such liberal figures Leonardo DeCaprio and Jonah Hill. Hollyweird indeed.
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
Starring Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates and Nina Arianda. 131 mins.
It's come to something when even playing the title character doesn't get you top billing. Richard Jewell (Hauser) was a security guard who during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics noticed a suspicious package and saved countless lives in the Centennial Park bombings. A morbidly obese oddball, Jewell goes from hero to villain when the FBI (Hamm) tell the press (Wilde) that he is their prime suspect, simply because he fits their profile as a lone bomber. (They'd probably been watching too much Cracker – it was massive back then.) It seems very unfair, and very unClint, that in the credits Hauser is listed after all the name actors; especially as his performance is just about the only one in the film that seems real.
You really believe in Hauser's Jewell and his pathetic attempts to assist the FBI because “he's law enforcement too.” Everybody else, (except Bates as his mother), is playing a movie figure. Rockwell is the quirky, offbeat movie lawyer determined to defend him, Hamm is just a smarmy villain.
There has been much moaning about the lack of diversity in Hollywood but for a supposedly liberal closed shop, it has a lot of time for registered Republican Eastwood. He may have empty chaired Obama at their convention but in LA he is seen as a free-thinking libertarian, a reasonable and balanced conservative. He regularly works with the town's most liberal figures and often gets them an Oscar or at least a nomination. Last year's The Mule, in which he played an elderly man delivering drugs for Mexican cartels, managed to embrace all shades of thought from Build-that-wall to Black Lives Matter.
Richard Jewell though is a rather crude piece. As Kathy Scruggs, the journalist that sleeps with the FBI to get the story, Olivia Wilde is shot to look as skanky as possible. The camera makes sure you get the bags under her eyes and her bad skin, while she is written to be charmless and grating in all her doings. It's a real hatchet job on a woman who died in 2001.
Jewell is an innocent, good-hearted, white working-class man who is looked down on and persecuted by The Establishment, simply because he is a single, white, working-class man. To save him, his lawyer has to browbeat him out of his instinctive deference to authority. It's a story of a grassroots patriot learning to distrust the state. Though Eastwood's low key style goes a long way in disguising it, this is straight down the line Trump deep state/ fake news hysteria; yet it has producer credits for such liberal figures Leonardo DeCaprio and Jonah Hill. Hollyweird indeed.
