1986: Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a supply clerk at an Atlanta law firm, overhears a heated phone argument between a lawyer, Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), and a U.S. senator. Contrary to either Jewell or Bryant’s (or our) expectations, the two begin to talk and become friends. Over a shooting game at a nearby arcade, Jewell confides that he wants to go into law enforcement. “APD, FBI, maybe Secret Service,” he says. He isn’t picky: What he wants is to protect people. Later, when it’s time for Jewell to move on—he’s gotten a job working security—Bryant traps Jewell in a promise, or rather, something of a bet. Don’t become an asshole, he says. “A little power can turn a person into a monster, Richard.” Jewell promises to be different.
1996: Piedmont College. Richard Jewell has become an asshole—a campus rent-a-cop who strolls through the halls with his police baton a-swinging and a POLICE cap atop his head. He’s been called in to the dean’s office for harassing a student, and that’s not all: He has by now earned himself a thick folder full of complaints, including reprimands for pulling people over on the nearby highway, something a campus cop has no authority to do. “I believe in law and order, sir,” he says when pressed to explain. “Can’t have a country without it.” He had already been dismissed from his previous job, at a sheriff’s office, after complaints. As of this moment, he is once again unemployed.
That is, until the 1996 Summer Olympics, which has just rolled in to town, bringing with it a new batch of local jobs—including security jobs, like the one Jewell nabs. It’s his first day on duty, and he puts on his white shirt, labeled “Security,” with a mix of pride and deflation. He asks his mother, “It’s still law enforcement, ain’t it, even if I’m just watching over a bunch of stereo equipment and whatnot?” Bobi Jewell (Kathy Bates) affirms: heck yeah. The next day, as he works security near a radio tower in Centennial Park, Jewell finds a bomb and alerts the “authorities,” of which he is not one, not really. The bomb goes off; one person dies and over a hundred more are injured. Jewell, hero, quickly becomes a suspect.
For a movie that’s already gotten somewhat of a reputation, one not wholly undeserved, for being a plain piece of conservative propaganda, Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is awfully ambivalent toward the forces of authority at its center—and often toward its titular hero, whose singular bravery is a stark counterpoint to the ways that this authority functions, and whose desire to conform to that force, to not only be a hero but a hero in uniform, feels equally unsustainable. This is not least because, as he learns over the course of the movie, he’ll never be like the people he admires.
If it wasn’t clear from those opening sketches, this is very much an Eastwood picture: crisply, economically told, with an odd coolness to it. (it is based on a Vanity Fair story by Marie Brenner published in 1997.) Like Sully, it’s a film about a man whose saviorhood comes under fire from seemingly unchecked political powers and media attention. Like American Sniper, it’s a portrait of an ostensible do-gooder failed by the institutions whose values he sought out to protect. Jewell is less accomplished than these previous films but equally embittered, strange, problematic, deceptively simplistic, and altogether riveting, not least because Eastwood’s political parables so plainly seethe with fury at his heroes’ enemies that it’s often satisfying to watch the director heighten and hyper-focus their errors with contagious righteousness. Jewell, to its credit, is anchored by one of the more complex heroes in Eastwood’s canon. But I’m still not certain it finds the most cutting or convincing path through this story.