Eastwood’s ‘Jewell’ a jewel of a movie

By Tom Jozwik

Published Dec. 17, 2019

In an email the other day, a friend kindly asked if I had any recent-film recommendations. I haven’t responded as yet, but I’m going to share two words with him. “Richard Jewell.”

Directed by Clint Eastwood, this 2:09, R-rated movie is not flawless, but it is riveting from start to finish. Paul Walter Hauser (“Late Night,” “7 Days to Vegas”), who plays the title character, the rotund hero-turned-wrongly-accused-Atlanta-Olympics-bomber, is outstanding. Sam Rockwood is even better as Jewell’s utterly uncowed attorney, Watson Bryant.

Kathy Bates is well-cast, although uncharacteristically unfunny, as Jewell’s
doting and doted upon mother. The villains of the drama (which is punctuated
with minimal yet just the right amount of comic relief) are John Hamm as an FBI
agent named Shaw and Olivia Wilde as newspaper reporter Kathy Scruggs; they are quite satisfactory, as is Nina Arianda as the attorney’s winning assistant and
love interest, an unswerving Jewell proponent even when boss Bryant has his
doubts.

Turns out the real-life, security guard Jewell (who died in 2007) was indeed a heroic bomb discoverer rather than a bomb planter, but you already know that if you know the narrative in which Eastwood’s movie is rooted. And that’s another excellent feature of “Richard Jewell” … although you enter  the theater cognizant of how the
film is going to turn out, the film manages to keep you in suspense—not unlike,
say, the wonderful reality-based  “Apollo 13” did some years ago.

Reportedly the paper for which Scruggs covered the 1996 bombing, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is up in arms about the reporter’s onscreen depiction here. The Scruggs character sheds a few tears of repentance near the end of this occasional tearjerker, but generally comes off as a biased journalist as unlikable as she is unethical. Hamm’s agent Shaw and his sidekick (Ian Gomez) are made to look even worse. One is left with the feeling  the filmmakers just might have stacked the deck.

Ultimately, of course, “Richard Jewell” is a feature film and
not a historical tome. It’s an exceptional feature film at that. I give it an
A.