OVP: Richard Jewell (2019)

Film: Richard Jewell (2019)
Stars: Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde
Director: Clint Eastwood
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Kathy Bates)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I have said in the past that I think that Republican politics can properly be put into movies, even if I disagree with them, if the movie is well-made and written.  I think that film is truly a universal artistic medium, and one that should be able to encompass even angles that I don't believe in, and perhaps no person is better-suited for such an argument as Clint Eastwood.  The most-talented conservative director (at least outwardly conservative) in Tinseltown today, Eastwood has made truly great pictures, including his masterpiece Unforgiven.  However, Eastwood's latest films, pretty much every picture since Letters from Iwo Jima, have struggled to combine the clear Libertarian message he's trying to portray within their confines.  American Sniper came very close, but royally botched its message in the ending (otherwise this was a great character study).  Today, we see what happens when everything goes wrong for Eastwood.  When the director's best instincts disappear and he indulges all of his worst traits as a director in order to fit in politics even when they don't work.  Today, we're going to get to Richard Jewell.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoilers...But There's Quite a Bit of Fiction Here So Maybe You Need the Alert Regardless) The film focuses on Richard Jewell (Hauser), a security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.  For those who were too young or don't remember, there was a bomb that went off in Centennial Park during a concert that killed one woman (and another person indirectly) and injured over 100 people.  Jewell was lauded initially as a hero, and then was considered one of the prime suspects at the time, particularly after an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitiution listed him as a person-of-interest despite the evidence connecting Jewell to the crime being pretty much nonexistent.  Jewell would successfully, after being exonerated, receive compensation from media organizations such as NBC News and the New York Post for defamation, and even receive a public apology from then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

This is all a very interesting story, and would make for a good movie.  There are more twists in this tale than you can remember at the time (perhaps mostly because it took nearly a decade after the attacks to find the true culprit, Eric Rudolph, at which point most people had forgotten about the bombing).  However, Eastwood doesn't craft that.  He instead creates a movie that takes what could be a decent conservative argument for media overreach and government interference into the life of an innocent man & tries to insinuate that this is the only goal of these two bodies.  In doing so, his politics over-reach and become bombastic rather than compelling.

He does this through two of the ugliest performances I saw all year onscreen, those given by Olivia Wilde (as journalist Kathy Scruggs) and Jon Hamm (as fictional FBI agent Tom Shaw).  Wilde's performance has already been under intense scrutiny, both because she's playing a real person (as a result, there's more responsibility to ensure that who she's portraying is given a modicum of accuracy, particularly considering the real-life Scruggs died in 2001 so she's not alive to defend herself), but it's a gross performance.  She plays Scruggs as a party girl who seems to constantly be drunk and yelling in the newsroom, and who is willing to sleep with Hamm's Shaw in order to get a story.  Considering there's no evidence this actually happened, it's a lazy trope that the beautiful woman in the newsroom can only get a story by putting out to the man in charge, and Hamm, Wilde, & Eastwood should be ashamed of putting such a sexist cliche into the picture.  One kind of wonders why Wilde, who is famous enough to not need to say yes to such a potentially damaging role, was willing to take on such a part.  She's also to blame for making her Kathy a scenery-chewing cartoon.  Hamm is her equal (and equally terrible) as Shaw, an angry Snidely Whiplash-style figure who is using his government power to tie innocent Richard Jewell (and his sweet old mother) to the train tracks.

Eastwood fills out most of the (too long) movie by having other instances of Jewell acting like a fool, trusting authority that doesn't trust him (sort of brushing past the fact that Jewell, as portrayed onscreen, had behaved quite inappropriately when given some form of power, harassing students & even assaulting one on a college campus).  But he also makes sure everyone else is an idiot save for Sam Rockwell's anti-government attorney Watson Bryant, who is clearly the Eastwood proxy in the picture, and gives multiple tirades about the evils of the media & the government.

I wouldn't have seen this movie (I'm not an Eastwood completist, though I do end up seeing a lot of his movies) were it not for the Oscar buzz surrounding Kathy Bates.  We're a week away from the nominations, so we don't know yet whether Bates will get her fourth citation for her work here, but she did score a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.  Bates isn't really that special here.  She's Kathy Bates so she's not bad, and probably the film's best performance (that might also be Rockwell, and if you know me at all you know that's saying something as Rockwell isn't really my cup-of-tea), but that's not saying much.  It's a showy role (I could totally see this getting a nomination considering the nature of the performance and how she gets some big moments in the back half of the picture), but it's more sympathetic than great acting.  Her Bobi is the only character that you can embrace easily without getting covered in the film's politics.  The rest of the movie is not so lucky.