Richard Jewell (2019, Clint Eastwood) (Patreon)

50/100

Second-guessing myself a lot here, because I was deeply suspicious of this project from the moment I first learned of it, and everything I subsequently saw of The Discourse suggested that I was right to be. That seems less than fair, so I've been struggling to imagine what my opinion might have been had Richard Jewell been made as recently as five years ago, when I'd likely have perceived it—Eastwood's presence behind the camera notwithstanding— as just another ho-hum, ripped-from-ancient-headlines biopic, rather than as a deliberate effort to sow further distrust in the FBI and the media. Tricky business, turns out. On the one hand, yes, the movie portrays Kathy Scruggs as unscrupulous bordering on outright evil...but on the other hand, Ace in the Hole, about a reporter who's unscrupulous bordering on outright evil, was a personal favorite of mine the last time I checked. (But then again, Chuck Tatum is the protagonist of Wilder's film, which is arguably a character study of a terrible human being. Scruggs, by contrast, is just someone who wantonly ruins the hero's life, and who gets her information in an ugly, gendered way.) On the one hand, yes, it's unconscionable that the FBI attempted to trick Jewell into waiving his rights by falsely telling him that he'd be playing a role in a training film...but on the other hand, I remember laughing at the David Simon bit (seen on both Homicide and The Wire, and taken from real life) in which detectives get a suspect to confess by pretending that a copy machine is a sophisticated new lie-detector test—a ploy that's really no less egregious, but that didn't bother me in a context that asks me to identify with law enforcement instead of the accused. (But then again, the Baltimore cops weren't employing deception to secure a signature that would potentially screw the guy in court later. One lie is meant to elicit the truth; the other is meant to skirt Miranda v. Arizona.) 

All of that mental recalibration resulted in a draw, basically. Which leaves me with my usual reaction to fact-based narratives—especially ones dramatizing a news story that I followed as it originally unfolded, so that I'm just watching actors re-enact familiar events. Hauser's terrific in the title role and by far the best reason to see the film; there's a remarkable absence of self-consciousness in his performance, at least until he's required to deliver a climactic speech insisting that he's Had Enough. And Eastwood tackles the night of 27 July '96 in a genuinely interesting way, ignoring our foreknowledge of the bomb and allowing Jewell to look like a paranoid, self-important doofus even as he takes all the right steps to secure people's safety. Richard Jewell is at its best when exploring the tension between professionals who should know better jumping the gun and Jewell's naive inability to recognize that everything he says and does makes him look guilty. Eastwood's not temperamentally inclined to leave things that gray, however, and the film eventually becomes a simplistic story of an innocent man railroaded and finally vindicated. (But then again...)