Clint Eastwood turns the sad true story of Richard Jewell into another salute to American heroism
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Clint Eastwood, the oldest of the old-timers, has in recent years focused on making movies about real-life stories of momentary heroes and underestimated men (some of whom aren’t heroes at all). To this hall of guys who were in the wrong place at the right time we can now add the sad story of Richard Jewell. He was the Atlanta security guard who briefly became a national hero after discovering a bomb at a concert at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Jewell’s moment of glory was short-lived. Within days, his hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, broke the news that he was being looked at as a person of interest by the FBI. Soon there was a widespread speculation in the media that Jewell himself had planted the bomb, which detonated as he and others were trying to clear the area, killing one person and injuring over 100 others.
Not that Eastwood is interested in crowds. At 89, he appears to be downright sick of directing them. In Richard Jewell, he makes no attempt to hide his contempt for gatherings of more than five people, whether it’s a crowd at Olympic Park doing the “Macarena”; a mob of reporters camping outside the apartment where Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) lives with his protective, dog-loving mom, Bobi (Kathy Bates); or the unseen millions of the kangaroo court of public opinion.
It didn’t help matters at the time that Jewell fit a certain stereotype. He’d once been arrested for impersonating a police officer and had been fired from his last job as a college security guard for pulling over drivers off-campus; his earlier stint as a sheriff’s deputy had ended under similarly ignominious circumstances. He was a wannabe, an overweight mama’s boy who got tricked into an interrogation at an FBI field office by agents who told him that he was starring in a training video. He was called “The Bubba Bomber,” “The Una-Doofus,” and worse.
Written by Billy Ray (whose own résumé of behind-the-headlines stories includes Captain Phillips and Shattered Glass), Richard Jewell portrays him as an underdog and an outsider. He talks too much. He wants to be one of the good guys. He can’t stop trying to ingratiate himself to the cops and the FBI, even when they come to execute a search warrant on his homey apartment. His mother wonders whether the feds might be so kind as to remove their shoes (the apartment is carpeted), and then looks on in horror as they cart off all of her Tupperware as evidence. (It could have been used to store bomb-making materials, opines her son, ever the unwitting self-incriminator.) Even his hero moment has a touch of ridiculousness to it: He’s suffering through a bout of diarrhea when he discovers that backpack full of explosives at Olympic Park.
Much of this material, the diarrhea included, comes by way of “American Nightmare,” a 1997 profile of Jewell written by Marie Brenner for Vanity Fair, from which Ray’s script also derives its sense of quotidian Southern eccentricity, embodied by Jewell, his mother, and their short-tempered and exasperated voice of reason, G. Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell). Bryant was a low-rent real estate lawyer who had befriended Jewell back in the mid-1980s, and ended up becoming his attorney despite a total lack of relevant experience. Like his client, he exists at the edge of caricature—the former hotshot now eking out a living in an unglamorous rented office. What’s surprising is how sincerely Eastwood treats his principals. (Or maybe it isn’t that surprising at all: Though never directly identified as such in the film, Bryant is described in Brenner’s piece as a diehard libertarian.)
In his recent men-in-crisis movies, with which Richard Jewell is very much of a piece, Eastwood has toyed with biopic conventions; the results have ranged from terrific, as in Sully, to embarrassing, as in the docudrama experiment The 15:17 To Paris. But here, he largely plays it straight. As in so many of his films, the underlying subject is the abuse of power, represented by the director’s favorite pointy-headed nemeses, the media and the FBI. Operating under the logic that a story about heroics needs a villain, Richard Jewell concocts one in the form of Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), the Journal-Constitution crime reporter who co-wrote the front-page story that precipitated Jewell’s public vilification.
Scruggs is depicted as a scoop-chasing sexpot who is literally in bed with the FBI, having been tipped off about the bureau’s suspicions about Jewell from Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), her friend-with-benefits at the Atlanta division. To be honest, the parts of the film that deal with Scruggs and her colleagues at the Journal-Constitution are awkwardly deployed and often laughable; a scene where Bryant comes to the newspaper office to berate Scruggs in person plays like rancid Aaron Sorkin. Which is to say that the film is at its creakiest and clumsiest when it tries to preach its core themes—the overreaching of the press and the government—and at its most humanizing when it simply focuses on giving space to the kind of characters who rarely get a starring role.
One has come to expect uneven and off-key performances in Eastwood movies, but that’s not the case here. In Richard Jewell, his subdued, no-nonsense directing style is buoyed by the strongest cast to grace one of his movies in some time. (Even Wilde and Hamm are very good in awkwardly written roles.) Like so many of the works of Eastwood’s long late period, Jewell offers a story without much of an endpoint, with an uplifting coda that feels almost as jarring as the ending of American Sniper. But somewhere within its surprisingly pacey two-plus hours is a compelling group portrait of ordinary oddballs in cruel circumstances; it relays Eastwood’s appreciation for individuals over masses better than any speech ever could.
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I assumed this movie was going to be an Eastwood screed against Fake News.
or an empty chair
Hey! That empty chair is the shadowy leader of the Deep State!
Reads like that is one of the core themes:“…the parts of the film that deal with Scruggs and her colleagues at the Journal-Constitution are awkwardly deployed and often laughable; a scene where Bryant comes to the newspaper office to berate Scruggs in person plays like rancid Aaron Sorkin. Which is to say that the film is at its creakiest and clumsiest when it tries to preach its core themes—the overreaching of the press…”
According to the press, the press never does anything shitty.
Except for, this really was fake news.
Well, the initial news was real. The FBI did consider him a suspect. Just the conjecture afterwards that wasn’t.
They considered him a suspect based on shitty reporting and biased investigators. He was a hero.
They didn’t consider him a suspect because of ‘shitty reporting’. They considered him a suspect because he fit a fairly broad profile. The reporting on that was actually accurate, but the dog whistle of ‘fits a profile’ was sounded and the press went off to the races. He absolutely was a hero who was unfairly maligned and turned into a punchline, the reporting that the FBI considered him a suspect wasn’t ‘fake news’. It is more of an example of yellow journalism if anything.
You say tomato, I say we’re basically saying the same thing using different words.
Perhaps. Fake news, being a loaded term for the press lying or fabricating stories, isn’t what happened because the facts were accurate. If your larger point is that a man who saved at least dozens of lives was dragged through the mud by commentators, talking heads, and shitty law enforcement then yes, we are saying the same thing. Although it might be worth mentioning that the FBI profile was at least somewhat accurate.
No it wasn’t. They reported that the FBI was investigating Jewell, which the agency was. It would have been fake news if they were wrong about that, or if they were the ones that suggested he did it.
I will give this very limited credit in that while the basis was true (crime committed, investigation of schlub commences, schlub eventually exonerated), the overall cultural reaction was an assumption that Jewell was yet another Angry White Guy, this time bombing the Olympics. He fit the general profile, wasn’t convincing in his own (eventually proven accurate) defense, he did nearly everything but show off his own homegrown bomb making lab in ways to make it easy for a panicked and irrational mob mentality to convict him via the internet and news. I pretty clearly remember news carrying a strong tone and bias in the methods of reporting that said “guilty until proven innocent, but seriously? guilty”.It wasn’t a shining moment.
In 1996, “yet another Angry White Guy” wasn’t a thing. That was about 100,000 mass shootings ago.
Overall…it was fake news. And everybody piled on, the government and the media. But I don’t want to give away the ending of the movie…
Overall…it was fake news.
Tell that to the Georgia Court of Appeals
That he was the prime suspect was, unfortunately, very real news. Its the dipshit investigators that deserve most of the blame for this.
He was the prime suspect based on ….wait for it….fake news. Just because Trump hammered the hell out of the phrase doesn’t mean that fake news doesn’t exist. It most certainly did/does.
The FBI was using actually reported fake news for the basis of considering him a suspect?
And the dipshit media types that uncritically repeated what they were told, rather than, you know, investigating…?Like I said above, Tom Brokaw was the worst — so smugly sure the FBI wouldn’t feed him Jewell’s name if they weren’t sure he was guilty that just watching him at the time was nauseating. If I’d been Jewell, I’d have sued Brokaw personally until all he had left was a barrel he could wear as he crawled back to North Dakota…
oh, wow, you used “fake news” un-ironically. goodness.
Fine. Made up news. I hope you’re happy, goodness.
Except it wasn’t… it was mishandled correct information that people incorrectly latched on to before more information was available.
get used to it. The phrase can be used so many ways- big beautiful ways… One person said- “Sir, this is the best way someone said that phrase”… so some say the best way… we’ll see what happens!
There is plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be lopped at the media industrial complex, and the Richard Jewell story shines a light on many of them.People seem to have forgotten that just because Trump hates something doesn’t mean it’s good. See also the CIA, the FBI, and the Democratic Party.
Can you imagine how something like this would go down in our current social media environment? Vilification by the broadcast media, CNN and AJC seems almost quaint by today’s standards.
The Fox news crowd is turning this into an indictment of both the entire media industry and the FBI/deep state which – sure, they fucked up.
Hopefully it won’t get lost in all this that the main villain of the story is Eric Rudolph – the conservative, anti-choice, anti-gay terrorist responsible for several bombings (including Olympic Park, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar) and the deaths of at least four people — including a police officer.
That’s the point. It is meant to indict the media allowing the trumpers to flee further into their bubble. The villain of the film is not the actual terrorist but the media. No one argues that the media did not get it wrong or that Jewell wasn’t screwed over by the FBI. So who is this film for besides people who are seeking a reason to distrust the media during the President’s impeachment
Yep. Just like how Sully was an indictment and exaggeration of evil, big/deep state gubbermint who hounded and railroaded the poor hero Captain Sully. The post crash investigation wasn’t a big deal and wasn’t as bad as depicted like as if we’re not supposed to have the NTSB do their jobs.Its incredible how Clint went from Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River, to pumping out feel good agitprop for right-wing midwesterners like this or 15:17 to Paris.
Do you remember the villainous welfare moocher family in Million Dollar Baby? Don’t give ol’ Clint too much credit.
Million Dollar Baby has it’s conservative themes too. The villain of the piece is really Maggie’s ungrateful welfare cheat family who don’t want to accept the financial help she wants to give them because they’d rather keep abusing welfare. It’s not the centerpiece of the film but it’s a pretty disgusting piece of conservative anti-welfare propaganda.
Not compared to this, Sully, 15:17 to Paris, and American Sniper which are straight up, undisguised, conservative propaganda specifically tailored to that crowd.Also, conservatives, especially the evangelicals, hated Million Dollar’s ending and protested/boycotted it complaining it was “misleading” and that it promoted assisted suicide.
I haven’t seen 15:17. Other than being about an Islamic terrorist attack what makes it conservative?
It’s also straight from the book by FX Toole, a former cut man for professional fighters. Boxing is rife with grasping family members dooming the private life of prize fighters due to uncontrolled spending and toxic behaviour. It was a major plot point of the story.
Thanks. Although the point in the film was, initially, that they weren’t willing to take Maggie’s help. She wanted to give them things from her new success but they wanted to stay on welfare. Wherever it comes from, it’s certainly a conservative theme that people are welfare are just cheating greedy scum who would rather live on the public dole than be self sufficient (or in this case, relying on the help of family members).
When people think of the Olympics bombing if they have any memory at all the majority of them think of Richard Jewell. I forgot who the real bomber is.
Let’s not forget who screwed Richard Jewell over globally – Tom Fucking Brokaw, smugly parroting what the FBI “leaked” to him while Bob Costa attempted to remind viewers (and Brokaw) that Jewell hadn’t been charged with anything yet, and that all Brokaw had cynically-divulged red meat to toss to the lions. That entire investigation was a travesty the FBI mishandled from Ground Zero — and while they were ruining Jewell’s life, the real bomber was off planning more atrocities…My wife and I were watching the Olympics live on NBC when it happened, and by the end of the evening I had a lot of respect for Bob Costa’s sensible and sensitive handling of what happened — and nothing but contempt for Tom Brokaw, which pretty much sums up what I think about him to this day….
That’s EXACTLY what he wants to do here. The media never accused Jewell of planting the bomb; they were simply reporting that the FBI was focused on Jewell, and apparently ONLY focused on Jewell, which they stupidly leaked to the media. It’s not the media’s fault the FBI fucked up. Could they have covered the story far less than they did? Of course they could have. But Jewell sued the media and there were lots of settlements, of course, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution refused to settle and ended up wininng because everything they published “was true at the time”.What’s more problematic here is how “Republican” Eastwood’s storytelling has become. “Fake Media destroys a white hero!” “White men stop brown people from terrorism!”, a difficult task considering some of the heroes were black or French. (The solution to this inconvenience? Just minimize their backstories!) Even when he attempted a “Racism is bad! movie, it still ended with a White Savior sacrifice.When he leaves his biases at home, he can be a great artist. When he injects them into his work, it almost always suffers.
Spot on. I’m sure Eastwood made this as a defense to Trump’s impeachment. Fucking retard.
Yep.I really, truly look forward to the facts of this case being completely ignored and papered over because “Eastwood is a conservative bootlikkar” or somesuch.And by “really, truly look forward,” I mean the opposite.
The facts that his defamation lawsuit was dismissed because he was the primary suspect when the media had reported it. I do not condone the media’s behavior in characterizing the man, but in a court of law it was decided that the falsehood of his involvement was not the fault of the Atlantic Journal Constitution.
Janet Reno publicly apologized for what the FBI did to him.Trump broke everyone’s brain and now they can’t possibly concede any point no matter how ludicrous on it’s face it is.
Did I ever claim the FBI was correct? The dude got railroaded by the FBI, that is entirely true. The FBI leaked his name, also true. The media, however is not culpable for idiotic assholes in the FBI. That is also true. Complain about the media’s mocking of his lifestyle, but let’s not act like he is a unique victim. Plenty of people are erroneously characterized based on the way they act, or the color of their skin, or their gender. Hell, Eastwood is doing it in this movie with the reporter sleeping her way to scoops.
Piedmon College settled with Jewell the libel case he filled against them.NBC News paid Jewell 500,000 in a settlement in the libel case filled.NY Post settled with Jewell with no terms annouced.CNN also settled with no terms annouced.
I can wikipedia also. NBC and CNN claim they did not err. The Post was sued over their characterizations of Jewell in cartoons, not whether he did it, and Piedmont is not media. In the only case that went to trial, the media won, multiple times. I have said it elsewhere but I will say it again, the media characterization of Jewell is bad, but not unique.
That’s true, but the legal standard for “was it the paper’s fault” is extremely high (for very good policy reasons – if you let people sue papers willy nilly, you get… the current Kinja hellscape, I guess). But that’s not the only standard – from a more everyday, moral or practical standard, it might be reasonable to put some fault onto the paper. (I have no idea whether that’s true here or not – I don’t know anything about the facts of this case.)
I agree. Our media often acts as stenographers for law enforcement before any legal process actually begins. Things like police blotters, can damage a name without any verification of the suspect’s guilt or innocence. The media should be better and failed to be so in the case of Jewell. Further it punished the man for being nothing more than a pariah who did not conform to standards. My issue is that the marketing of the film, and, based on reviews, its actual conduct cast the media as the villains of this story, whereas a society that consumed the media and created the standards that Jewell did not conform to is held blameless.
I also think the media took the meaning of “person of interest” straight to a guilty verdict without thinking of what that really entails. Of course the guy who found a bomb that no one else had noticed would be on the list.
(for very good policy reasons – if you let people sue papers willy nilly, you get… the current Kinja hellscape, I guess)Oof, too true.
Jewell’s suit wasn’t dismissed because he was a primary suspect. It was dismissed because the Court determined that his voluntary participation in media interviews made him a limited purpose public figure, which changed the standard of proof required of him to prove defamation from a preponderance of proof of negligence to clear and convincing proof of actual malice. *Edited for grammar, which is still probably wrong.
His lawsuit against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was dismissed, but NBC and the NY Post paid him at least half a million dollars in settlements.
This guy’s life got totally fucked by the media and FBI. Say what you want about Eastwood’s politics but once this story got going it completely took on a life of its own.
I mean the question is whether Eastwood bothered to mention any of this in the movie. Also, he is.
I mean the question is whether Eastwood bothered to mention any of this in the movie. Correct! Also, he is. Which is irrelevant to the facts of the case. The case itself fascinates me on a few levels, so that’s more what I give a shit about.
I guess I’m just not getting how you’re blaming the possibility of that on people calling Eastwood out on being a right-winger.
Which he is and has pretty much always been — more of the Libertarian than Authoritarian variety, but a Right-Winger just the same. In any Eastwood movie, you kind of have to filter what he says through what you know about him, or else you’ll have a pretty cuckoo worldview.
What do you mean by “bootlikkar”? Serious question, why “-likkar”?
Serious question, why “-likkar”?Because it’s quikkar … ?
Ah yes! “Fill ‘er up!”
Ah yes!
It’s a deliberate misspelling, because I feel that the term “bootlicker” has been weakened due to fucking idiots running it into the ground.
Right, I assumed it wasn’t accidental, or a mistype – why “-likkar”, is my question. I’m not actually sure what you’re saying in your post, and thought maybe the spelling could be a clue.
Good post.
No, the main villain in the story of Richard Jewel is the FBI and the media. The main villain in the Olympic Park Bombing is Eric Rudolph. This is a movie about Richard Jewel.And why has the left allowed this story to become a fodder for Fox News Watchers in the first place? This is not a one time mistake by the press its their modus operandi from local news to international news to this day. Press reports what relevant powers deem the story rinse repeat. From local news pushing the narrative of the local police and sheriffs that leak them stories or headline arrests about some local “Sex Trafficking Ring” being arrested later all the charges are reduced and dropped. To stories of government overthrows where they can’t seem to find Coup d’etat despite you know the army arresting the elected president.We had a press including the NYT publish stories that had leaked lies to get us into Iraq war and that did follow the papers on internal guidelines. Yet no punishment.
Yeah and the FBI did get him in the end. He was just a pathetic weirdo living out in the middle of nowhere eating trash. He was hard to find.
“He’d once been arrested for impersonating a police officer and had been fired from his last job as a college security guard for pulling over drivers off-campus; his earlier stint as a sheriff’s deputy had ended under similarly ignominious circumstances.”These facts alone were enough to rightfully place him on the FBI’s ‘suspicious’ list.The fact that he was subject to public profiling, prejudice, and ridicule after identification and/or arrest is absolutely no different than what any suspect is subject to pre-trial if they are black, Muslim, religious zealot or Trumpkin. That scorn is par for the course in a country that enjoys free speech. He was fortunate that the automatic public reflexive reaction to his profile was “Bubba” jokes and not bloodthirsty vitriol. He was soundly cleared and freed. Under different circumstances, in a different body, but with the *same* amount of circumstantial evidence, he would have been shipped to Guantanamo to never be heard from again. Clint would be myopic on this point, but we shouldn’t be.
Hopefully it won’t get lost in all this that the main villain of the story is Eric Rudolph – the conservative, anti-choice, anti-gay terrorist responsible for several bombings (including Olympic Park, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar) and the deaths of at least four people — including a police officer.Narrator: It got lost in all of this that the main villain of the story is Eric Rudolph – the conservative, anti-choice, anti-gay terrorist responsible for several bombings (including Olympic Park, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar) and the deaths of at least four people — including a police officer.
When I saw that this was directed by Eastwood I knew it would be a right wing screed and so I checked the cast list and didn’t see anyone credited as Rudolph. There’s no way in hell Eastwood is going to make a film about an anti-abortion terrorist killing and injuring people.
Eastwood may be conservative but that’s just a ridiculous statement. Are you suggesting he’s supportive of domestic terrorism??
I think that Eastwood, like many conservatives, codes “terrorism” as something that brown people do. I don’t think he’s aware of the extent of right wing terrorism in this country and probably doesn’t regard it as terrorism. This is a guy, after all, who made a film about Nelson Mandella which was all about blacks being nice to the good hearted white folks who were scared about the end of Apartheid.
Eastwood is pro-choice.
You ever hear of an echo chamber? Cause you’re in one, love.
Rush-to-judgement villification of innocent people by way of sensationalist, populist shoddy journalism is one of Fox News’ specialties. They would have been part of the media circus outside Jewell’s house except they didn’t go on the air until the very month the FBI exonerated Jewell.One of the tragedies of the Richard Jewell saga is that it effectively covered up right-wing bigoted domestic terrorism. Most people new about Jewell as the bomber suspect but not about Rudolph and his ideology. Just one year after the OKC bombing, Right-wing white nationalist terrorism should have been front and center, and it was just wasn’t. They were all written off as lone wolf criminals.
I immediately thought “Clint’s doing the GOP a solid by pointing out (just in time for elections) how evil both the media and national intelligence are.”
This is exactly what I was afraid of when I heard that Clint Eastwood was the producer of this movie, and exactly why I won’t be seeing it.
Well, Eastwood is also the guy who glossed over the fact that Chris Kyle, despite being armed and a fully capable marksman, was shot by a “bad guy with a gun” on American soil. Perfectly fine showing women and children being sniped in the parenthesis of warfare, but a white American male gets shot by his buddy with mental health issues, and suddenly to show it would be disrespectful.
With Eastwood, the historical facts he excludes reveals just as much as what he keeps in.
If I found a backpack full of explosives, I too would shit myself. Most likely on the spot.
I’m so glad that he made another aggrieved white man movie.
“Let’s get Michael B. Jordan to play Jewell.”“But Jewell was white.”“It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.”
Yep, the story is invalid because a white man is at the centre of it.
I’m so glad to read another aggrieved white man comment.
The story isn’t invalid because a white man is at the center of it, but that doesn’t mean the most interesting way to make a movie about a right-wing, white supremacist terror attack is to make it solely about an aggrieved white man.
Well, unless of course the aggrieved white man is the one who actually committed the crime because of teh gayz.
Dude was pretty aggrieved. I haven’t seen the movie yet so maybe it’s bad. But Jewell’s story certainly seems more interesting than a movie about a nutjob bomber.
This is true of all your comments
Well, he’s apparently only willing to engage with a black man in the form of an empty chair and emptier ranting. That doesn’t make for good anything, let alone movies.
I wish I could reduce everything down to race too. What a talent!
I agree. I signed up for the Air Force because of Captain Marvel’s girl power. That’ll show those trolls!
You’re soooooo brave.
I’m so glad that you’re glad.
‘aggrieved white man movie’ – you are an idiot, this is a guy who was falsely accused of an act of terrorism and was vilified, you act like he’s Brock Turner or something
The media treatment of Richard Jewell at the time was brutal. It was the equivalent of high school bullies ganging up on the awkward fat kid. I remember there was a rather innocuous hunting photo of him posing with a rifle (if you have any friends that hunt, you’ve seen a similar photo) that the networks somehow got their hands on and they used to alternatively mock him as a wannabe warrior and to incriminate him as a potential domestic terrorist.
I remember Letterman and Leno had plenty of fun with him at the time as well.
Leno especially. He just loved to punch down on decent people caught up in a mess, he handled this about as well as Monica.
I don’t quite get what was so bad about the Monica thing. I mean sure, people do dumb things when they’re young, and she seems like a good person, but she was still an adult with free will and all.
Its not her, its just how people mocked her more then anything else, for years after. Like ten years later he was still saying crap like ten sucking years. It came off as needlessly cruel without even being slightly amusing. That and Leno has always sucked, no pun intended.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“To get to the other side!” (crickets from the audience)
“You see, there was this chicken, and he had to get to the other side, so he crossed the road!”
The basic delivery style of every damn Jay Leno standup act for the past 30 years..
I was a reporter in Washington during the Clinton Administration, and that was an actual witch hunt. Newt Gingrich leading a moral crusade? Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow job. That would be the 12,445th worst thing Trump did today, and I haven’t even had lunch. It just shows how little dirt they actually had on him (and his wife) and how they were willing to trample any moral or legal barriers in their attempt to nail him. Meanwhile, most of Congress and America is on the fence about impeaching a guy who freely admits doing what he’s accused of.
IIRC, wasn’t it more about lying on the stand than actual lying?
I will remind the world at every opportunity: the woman with whom Newt Gingrich committed adultery, while impeaching Bill Clinton for sexual misdeeds, is now the actual US Ambassador to the Vatican.
Now, now, let’s make sure we’re completely above board with this.
He didn’t JUST commit adultery with her – he eventually left his terminally ill wife while she was dying of cancer for her.
Truly, a love story for the ages.
No, incredibly enough, that was a DIFFERENT wife that he cheated on. He’s had 3; the cancer patient was #1, Callista is #3. (Also, #1 did not die of her cancer — the cancer was in 1980 and she lived until 2013.)
Yeah I didn’t realize how much of a piece of shit he was until that John Oliver piece
remember how in the 90’s a comedy wasn’t a comedy unless it had Jay Leno in it to deliver a lame joke at a character’s expense? I remember the incredibly cringey “best actress” joke he did about Kevin Kline in In and Out. It was so bad it made me wonder if the writers didn’t make it that way to zing Leno. Glad he disappeared.
Oh fuuuuuuck you for reminding me of that. God he really was a terrible comedian.
“At 89, he appears to be downright sick of directing them. In Richard Jewell, he makes no attempt to hide his contempt for gatherings of more than five people, whether it’s a crowd at Olympic Park doing the “Macarena”; a mob of reporters camping outside the apartment where Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) lives with his protective, dog-loving mom, Bobi (Kathy Bates); or the unseen millions of the kangaroo court of public opinion.”
That’s interesting. In what way does he demonstrate this in the movie?
You can see him in the wide shots zapping them with a cattle prod.
More importantly, was the Macarena even a thing in the summer of ‘92?
The Atlanta Olympics were held in 1996.Jesus, you’d think people could take a couple of seconds to do a simple Google search (or just read the fucking article) before spouting off ignorant comments, but you’re certainly not the first.
No, but it was during the 1996 Olympics.
You got the tone of the Eastwood film correct. I suspect if he could live long enough for a conservative/libertarian writer could make up and write about Obama’s war crimes and/or political offenses, we would see a movie about that. Until then, he will be remembered (most people under 30) as the guy that talked to an empty chair.
He’s going to be remembered as one of the greatest actors/directors in the film industry ever
Any time someone brings up the “huh huh he talked to an empty chair!” joke it’s pretty much a guarantee you don’t have to take them seriously.It’s so stupid. Pretending he was actually hallucinating Obama was there or something, rather than doing an improv’d riff on the old Bob Newhart routine.
Written by Billy Ray (whose own résumé of behind-the-headlines stories includes Captain Phillips and Shattered Glass) SOLD.
Also, Breach.
With The Mule, Eastwood raised the bar.
I’m only seeing Richard Jewell if it has three 3-ways!
I’m seein’ double—an 18-way!
And they better all have Sam Rockwell in them.
I bet Kevin James is really pissed he missed out on this role!
Melissa McCarthy nailed the audition!
Wait, how’d she have sex with an audition? A casting agent maybe…
Bingo! There’s the hateful, misogynist comment that sadly reveals a knuckle-scraping Neanderthal lurking in the A.V. Club’s comment section. You sir, are a Fopdoodle.
Here’s my pitch: Jewell in the Rough, a comedic take where Kevin James plays Richard Jewell, now working as a bumbling security guard at Augusta National Golf Club who uncovers a plot to detonate a bomb beneath the 18th hole during The Masters!
Throw in at least one scene featuring a Segway and I’m in!
I thought it would center on him being a traffic cop in Paris and accidentally fucks up traffic when Princess Diana is in town…
Throw in Adam Sandler as Dodi Fayed, and you’ve got a stew…
Paul Blart 3: Olympic Park Security Guard
Jesus man, don’t joke about that!… Kevin James might actually do it! 😁
“A Tradition Like No Other!”
It’s a surprise prequel to Paul Blart mall cop
Oh, so it’s a part of the PBCU: the Paul Blart Cinematic Universe.
Do the McElroys have to watch it every Thanksgiving now?
I’m glad that Paul Walter Hauser was cast in this; it seems like a natural progression from his I, Tonya character.
The contempt, even after all these years, that journalists have for Richard Jewell is just extraordinary. If you read the passages IV wrote about him in this review, you’d think this pathetic cretin of a man deserved everything that was heaped upon him.
I thought this review was describing the media’s and this movie’s portrayal of Jewell, not passing judgment on the man himself.
Dear screenwriters: Stop writing stories about journalists who sleep with sources. You’d think our shared experience as nerdy, workaholic, under-appreciated writers would engender a little more understanding and empathy from their side of things.
Cosigned. This trope is old and tired and damaging to women in the profession. But screenwriting is so dominated by men, and many of those men apparently lack the empathy necessary to write “the other”—be it women or other ethnicities or the LGBTQ community. As a result, we continue to get stories that reduce these groups to sad tropes, movies that can’t pass the Bechdel test, and media that objectifes and sexualizes in lieu of character development. It sucks. They’re writing what they know, and that’s men. The average screenwriter (white and male) has spent his entire life consuming popular culture that tells stories catered to him about people who look like him. If narratives help shape culture and understanding, those of us who aren’t white men get a lifetime of culture being filtered through a white male lens aimed at a white male audience. We’re use to getting narratives from the perspective of a man. We learn to look, to understand, to even internalize these perspectives almost by default. White men, conversely, rarely get steeped in the perspectives of others. It shows in their limited ability to craft convincing characters that aren’t avatars of themselves.
“But screenwriting is so dominated by men”It really isn’t. People like you can take literally anything and twist it into a “well actually LGBTQIA+ people have it worse and by highlighting something besides that you’re actually hurting those people”. That must be exhausting?
It is lazy writing because they can’t be bothered to depict how journalism really happens. They figure some sex will explain it better and titillate the audience. It is the equivalent of screenwriters inventing torture scenes to gain crucial intelligence. Wrong, Lazy and Dangerous.
One of the things I really liked about Spotlight was that it put (objectively beautiful) Rachel McAdams in some of the most unflattering pleated khakis and button-up shirts with sensible chunky shoes. It pretty much nailed the wardrobe I had when I was a reporter. Every woman in the newsroom dressed like that. McAdams looked like the boring professional that I was. They nailed that particular detail.
From the Vanity Fair article (sounds entirely plausible she was sleeping with her source): At The A.J.C., Kathy Scruggs, a police reporter, who had allegedly gotten a tip from a close friend in the F.B.I., got a confirmation from someone in the Atlanta police.
I can’t even think of another movie that features this “trope” as you put it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/sharp-objects-female-journalists-in-culture/567898/
It’s actually more common in TV, but happens plenty on screen in both media.
Yeah I don’t know if 4 examples from the last 20 years is that frequent.
Yeah I don’t know if the four examples listed in that story from The Atlantic are the only examples of this trope, since The Atlantic probably wouldn’t devote writing a whole story about it then.
Yeah because it’s impossible for the Atlantic to be engaged in the same clickbate bullshit as the people on this website. If there are more examples they should list them. What people like you really want apparently(and i’m not even sure you’re aware of this in your own minds) is for women with absolutely no flaws to be depicted on screen and to have no arcs what so ever. This kind of criticism is a cancer to legitimate criticism.
That article linked to by seanpiece also has links to other examples besides the four listed. What people like you really want apparently(and i’m not even sure you’re aware of this in your own minds) is for women with absolutely no flaws to be depicted on screen and to have no arcs what so ever. This kind of criticism is a cancer to legitimate criticism. 1) Using the “you’re the real sexist” argument is and always will be a pitiful deflection. There is a difference between writing women as flawed characters (and isn’t it interesting that often this involves them being sexualized in some way?) and asking to not follow stereotypes.2) Keep in mind that the subject of this article is not a fictional character that was created from scratch but a real life person who is being depicted as being willing to trade sexual favors for the story, something she did not do in real life.
Or, OR … I want exactly what I said, which is for stories about journalists to stop featuring them sleeping with people to get story leads. Especially since this is based on a real story, in which this didn’t happen, so it’s entirely invented to perpetuate a narrative supported by this film that journalism is inherently sleazy.
But please, continue telling me what I’m unaware that I want in my own mind, just because YOU haven’t noticed a trend in stories about journalists.
Every movie Clint Eastwood directs makes me feel like I’m dragging around a set of barbells while I watch it.
Aging rich himbo still somehow thinks he is champion of the common man. Makes movie tarring the FBI and the media (adding sexism and violation of journalistic ethics) when the FBI and the media are aligned against his sexist unethical candidate of choice.
Did Eastwood ever endorse Trump?
Oh yeah, that’s a fantastic point, because even after the Esquire interview and everything we know about Eastwood, I’d have to have a secretly shot video of his hand pulling the lever for Trump to use basic common sense. Then there has to be a trial and he has to have been convicted of voting for Trump by clear and convincing evidence. And then he can say “I VOTED for Trump…but did I SUPPORT him?” and there’s a mistrial and the entire thing has to be done over and nobody can ever know the real truth about anybody. Or your response is silly.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t and has never said anything one way or the other.
See: comment reply to TGGP from jcccarBe: less dumb.
Yeah, I should spend all day posting on this website like you do. Then I’d be less dumb.
I’m getting paid a fucking ton of money to sit here and post this. So you tell me, tiger.
Ooh, so very smart and rich too? This asshole’s the total package right here, folks.
Lol. Bragging about how much money you make. I think you’ll find it harder to be a bigger tool than this.
I don’t know which Esquire interview you’re referring to. Did he say anything about Trump there?
He doesn’t endorse trump, something he outright says, but there definitely are things you can tell what his mindset is. “Maybe. But he’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist. And then when I did Gran Torino, even my associate said, “This is a really good script, but it’s politically incorrect.” And I said, “Good. Let me read it tonight.” The next morning, I came in and I threw it on his desk and I said, “We’re starting this immediately.””“What Trump is onto is he’s just saying what’s on his mind. And sometimes it’s not so good. And sometimes it’s … I mean, I can understand where he’s coming from, but I don’t always agree with it. ““I haven’t endorsed anybody. I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody. You know, he’s a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, “Oh, well, that’s racist,” and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a46893/double-trouble-clint-and-scott-eastwood/
I’m referring to the Esquire interview where Eastwood talked about Trump. I don’t know what you think my obligation is to you here, but commenter jcccar assisted your obviously defective fingers and keyboard, have fun.
Or your reaction to one person’s opinions is silly.As though there aren’t dozens of films/shows out there espousing your political beliefs/leanings. Bet you don’t get so butthurt when things get slanted in the direction you prefer.
He slanders this woman who is dead by showing her sleeping with a source. He literally shows the media and the FBI in bed together. Your argument is basically that I must be as venal and stupid as you and I wouldn’t have a problem with lies and garbage from my side because you have no standards. Savor that argument, bucky.
I can’t believe that Matty Matheson is now a bonified movie star. It’s the role he was born to play.
I’d never heard of the lead actor, so assumed Clint had followed that Paris train movie and cast the real person.
The real person in this case is dead.Try doing a 2-second Wikipedia search before making ignorant comment next time.
Kinda hard when he’s been dead for over a decade.
dood, spoilers…
Overreach media and FBI hate really feels like cover for Trump talking points. A pity if thats what the take away message is, since the real story is a harrowing example of people assuming things without much information and the cruelty shown to a decent human being.
My eyebrows were raised as soon as I saw the poster say “The world will know his name and the truth”. Which suggests there was a cover up.So then I had to go home and google who Richard Jewell was because I’m not old enough to remember the Atlanta Olympics. Only to discover, of course, that uh actually the world already knows the truth: he was suspected of doing it (naturally); the press didn’t exercise nearly enough restraint in its coverage; he was cleared of suspicion; the actual terrorist was caught; the press moved on.Yeah Richard Jewell got a raw deal. But not as raw of a deal as the people actually murdered and maimed by the real terrorist.
I’m old enough to remember. Various media outlets painted him as either a dangerous right-wing terrorist (as far as we know now, he wasn’t particularly political), or as a pathetic wannabe warrior. There was a lot of brutal punching down., and the fat jokes were rampant.
I don’t think he was ever portrayed as a terrorist. The actual perpetrator Eric Robert Rudolph was a terrorist. A white evangelical Christian terrorist who killed people because of his anti abortion views. The theory with Richard Jewell was that he had planted the bomb so that he could find it and be a hero. His background contained a number of incidents suggesting that this might be a plausible motivation.
Of course Richard Jewell got off better than people that were killed (I’m not even sure what your point is), but he got royally screwed, even if you’re too young remember.I bet even today, if you ask “who was the Olympic Park Bomber,” far more people would answer Richard Jewell than Eric Rudolph.
You’re missing the essential point. Of course Eric Rudolph is an evil terrorist and a murderer. We have prisons for people like that. We expect better behavior from our police (FBI in this case) and the press. This story is about their abuses.We give our police guns, life-or-death authority, the power to lock people in cages, and pillage their property “in search of evidence”. The FBI abused that power. They were dumbstruck looking for the culprit and saw the meek, soft-spoken Richard Jewell as an easy patsy to close a high profile case on. Bear this fact: they found no evidence, zero, none, to implicate Jewell in the bombing. Their hope was that by running him through a media feeding frenzy, he would crack and confess, whether or not he actually committed the crime -as long as the case was closed. They would go home & sleep like babies.Their incompetence and wanton disregard for basic human dignity was so rampant that for years, whenever the police had a hard time cracking a case, the running joke was that they thought Richard Jewell did it. Our press likes to exalt itself as a “fourth estate”, to be unfettered in its constitutional liberties. I’m all on board with the liberty to print what they see fit. That liberty comes with a responsibility. So, I also see no fault in shaming the media for its shameful conduct. I have no sympathy for them. The Atlanta Journal Constitution may claim that it was ignorant that the drivel fed to them by the FBI was all a lie, but it was willful ignorance. It’s like your jobless cousin giving you a gift of a slightly used BMW; it would be prudent to check the source of this good fortune. The media was nothing more than the FBI’s parrot and enjoyed its parrot status as long as the ratings soared.
Yeah, being accused of a terrible crime when you’re innocent is just something you shrug off, it’s no big deal. Also he died at just 44.
Why is it so surprising that Eastwood treats a Libertarian “sincerely”? I can’t parse where they fit on your dogma meter. Is anyone not in lockstep with your cornball dogma akin to a Republican like Eastwood?
Why is it so surprising that Eastwood treats a Libertarian “sincerely”? I can’t parse where they fit on your dogma meter. Is anyone not in lockstep with your cornball dogma akin to a Republican like Eastwood?
Was “Sully” terrific? I skipped it.
It was a solid film.
Yeah it was. It did try to wrangle more drama out of a fairly standard NTSB inquest by making the board seem kind of villainous, but other than that, it was great. Tom Hanks is top notch in doing what later day Tom Hanks does. (The performance shares a lot of DNA with Hanks work in Bridge of Spies) The score by Christian Jacobs is really superb. It surrounds the film in perfect penumbra of bittersweet melancholy without overwhelming or becoming intrusive. In part because they drop in the most intense scene kid of letting it fill the afterwards. It is surprisingly funny in dark human way. Worth a watch.
“In part because they drop in the most intense scene kid of letting it fill the afterwards.”
I don’t know what this sentence means, but it’s dark and evocative.
Thanks. I’ll be more open to watching it.
Hauser was pretty great in ‘I, Tonya’, so I’m glad he’s getting more work, even if this is a film I have no desire to see.
He’s good in Cobra Kai, too.
I still think Eastwood might have one last great film in him, but he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to prove it.Gran Torino should have been his swansong.
At the risk of sounding ageist, most 89 year olds are lucky to have one good bowel movement left in them, let alone a transcendent work of art.
The more I learn about Sully, the less I like his version of it. They could have easily turned it into Sully reflecting on all of this without adding in the inquiry establishment “bad guys”. From what I understand the inquiry was largely a “we love Sully” love fest. As Ignatiy largely points out, that’s the big problem with Eastwood’s movies. Not that there’s not complicated stories to tell… Richard Jewell is a big one because it is such a failure of the media and the FBI. I also think that Chris Kyle is also another complicated one… he’s not a good guy, but most likely he was suffering from a ton of PTSD, and needed help. But he wants to focus too much on what his Westerns are known for, there’s a good guy, and then the bad guy comes in to challenge the good guy, and the good guy isn’t just right he was EXTRAORDINARLY right. The endings are essentially the end of those memes where the Marine punches the atheist professor and they all clap. But i also think that so many want to push back on these narratives that we’re losing the nuance in the stories just as much Eastwood. Jewell’s story is ridiculously tragic, and it was a real failing of a lot of people who WANTED him to be the bomber. That’s how media narratives work, and why we’re saddled with so many conspiracy theories now. And the media does need to own up to that in a way I don’t think it really has. So does the FBI, which it will never own up to. I guess I’m working through this a lot, not just the way talk about Eastwood’s work, but how pushing back on it could erase important things. I think Ignaity does a decent job of it, but I’ve seen others that are less forgiving and kind of blame Jewell a little too much. Or worse, act like this isn’t a story worth telling, when it’s an important one, because it’s a big one that shows how a lack of media literacy can really hurt.
I don’t know if I buy the idea that Eastwood is trying to do a simplified Western version. This is the guy who directed Unforgiven, which is one of the best deconstructions of the Western genre.
I think the issue is that Eastwood has become more political in the last 15-20 years. Most of his last couple of movies have had pretty strong right wing themes. Even something like Invictus, which I enjoyed and got great reviews, basically glosses over white oppression during Apartheid and makes the story about innocent white people and blacks forgiving them.
Maybe. He’s a talented director, but any talent is like the Hulk… it depends on where you aim it. I just think that he tries to simplify complicated stories by showing us the outsider, then the inevitable pushback to the film focuses on his big message, and not the nuance.
The issue is that these narratives need to be pushed back on because they’re being deliberately used to suggest misleading conclusions. The people who are most likely to be demonized and suffer most from simplified media narratives that focus on blood, death, and punishing perpetrators are those who lack a voice to contest the portrayal or use the legal system to fight back. Jewell got fucked over, but then got a million+ dollars in settlements. Meanwhile, Trump can imply that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and degenerates despite that being demonstrably untrue, Fox News will pick it up, and the only people who will suffer are the undocumented immigrants, who will never see any kind of redress. The media’s reserving “terrorist” as a label that applies almost exclusively to Muslims has real consequences for Arab Americans.
Our media is a sensationalist mess, but a movie like this that represents a white security guard as its primary victim (with, let’s face it, a not particularly subtle pro-Trump agenda) is guilty of the same kind of distortion that it’s claiming to fight. Like most of the actual media in the Jewell case, even if nothing it says is technically a lie, it’s pushing an inaccurate understanding of the problem. And while “this problem only counts when it happens to white people” is not at all unusual in Hollywood, it’s particularly galling in this case when presented as a backhanded defense of one of the biggest purveyors of hysterical bullshit in recent memory.
That reminds me of the “Homer Badman” episode where absolutely everyone believes the feminist straw woman who thinks he’s a sexual assaulter where in real life people would be defending Homer and fucking crucifying the feminist college student.
I actually knew Jewell a bit, through some high school friends who worked summer jobs in (this will be shocking) a store security department that he ran years before the events here. He was just a nice, mild-mannered guy and anyone who knew him at all could have told you he was not single-handedly outwitting the FBI. I was also in the Olympic park earlier on the night of the bombing (my roommate was there when it happened, fortunately not near the spot) and about fell out of my chair when I saw Jewell’s face on the news. He wasn’t brilliant, but he wasn’t some slack-jaw like every picture I’ve seen of the actor from this movie.
My experience between media coverage of events which I have witnessed is that they feel it necessary to form some sort of narrative in order to tell the story, and usually that requires the people involved to be made into caricatures of some stereotype or other.
Wow!To be fair, they don’t depict him as a complete yokel in the film; the movie gets some mileage out of the idea that he is some ways smarter than the FBI agents think he is when they try to manipulate him. He’s a depicted as someone who knows more about rules than about people.
That’s good to hear. In every still I’ve seen he looks like a total mouth-breather.He was just a normal guy (I never noticed any real social awkwardness other than being a little shy) so the whole thing was just surreal. I called one of the guys who had worked with him, who I hadn’t talked to in six or seven years, and he was already flipping out when he answered.
We missed the bombing, by sheer luck. We were at the EXACT location the bomb went off, 24 hours earlier. The night of the bombing, we were in Athens to watch indoor volleyball…otherwise, we might be dead.
Yeah, we were probably there a half-dozen times over the course of the games. It really cast a pall over the rest of what until then had been one nonstop city-wide party.
Please folks, do not turn this movie into some “right vs. left” thing. We already have enough of that in our pathetical political process.The sad story of Mr. Jewell is a cautionary tale of what happens when we trust government with far too much power, allow it to trample the rights of the individual (as it will always do), and watch it go horrifyingly unchecked by a media untethered by journalistic rigor as it morphs into 24/7 cable news infotainment focused entirely on ratings. This film is neither liberal nor conservative, neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump. It is about the necessity of preserving individual liberty, most crucially through our sacred presumption of innocence. Mr. Eastwood has done us all a great service in this film. Pity that so many must make it a part of their imaginary binary political world
it wasn’t just he FBI and the Media.. but the International Olympic Committee needed someone to focus on so that they could salvage the games. They had over promised and under delivered on attendance for the games, there were all kinds of logistical issues that weren’t dealt with until the last minute and the amount of money that projected to come into Atlanta wasn’t. The last thing they needed was to have people worried about terrorist attacks..
I can respect that many here are wary of some sort of conservative propaganda on Eastwood’s part for focusing on Jewell and his treatment instead of Eric Randolph. But, to be fair, that would be nothing more than another cheap “based on a true story” thriller. Unless y’all actually think there’s some sort of depth behind the story of Eric Randolph. The whole problem is that that sort of random-ass white-boy terror has, by it’s very nature, almost no depth to it: some insular shitheel believed some entirely idiotic conspiracy theory enough to blow people up about it, the end. Jewell’s story is clearly the more compelling one, and opining that proof of the insidiousness of Eastwood’s politics lies in the fact that Randolph isn’t even cast is sort of like being aghast that no-one was cast as Hitler in Schindler’s List: unless you’re listening to Serial or Cold Case Files, no one gives a shit about murderers, and we really shouldn’t. It is the stories of the people who were hurt by and helped alleviate a disaster that are interesting. Because the terrifying thing is that anyone can blow up a building or end a life. It’s much harder to try and save or repair one, even if (or especially if) it’s your own.
I’m not disputing that Eastwood’s political leanings affect his filmmaking. I just don’t think it’s as dire an effect as some seem to think it is. At worst (at least in terms of directorial POV), Eastwood’s films often just feel old fashioned, like a John Wayne movie, not strident or overtly offensive to a liberal perspective.
Scoop-chasing sexpot! My word!
I can’t wait until Mr. Eastwood makes his next movie about Sunil “Sunny” Tripathi, the Arab-American young man who died by suicide about a week after being falsely accused on social media and then in the mainstream press of being the Boston Marathon bomber.