On Friday, July 17, the opening day of the 1996 Summer Olympics, I was in Atlanta with my good friend Bashi. She always had the best ideas for adventures, and I was usually the first one to sign up. We were there for about five days or more (I can’t quite remember), and we definitely spent time in Centennial Olympic Park. You can imagine our horror that we learned that a bomb had exploded there on July 27, killing two people and injuring more than 100. Yes, I thought, I could have been there had our plans altered a bit. I recall at the time that they quickly apprehended the bomber. Little did I know it was the wrong man. In fact, it wasn’t until I saw the movie “Richard Jewell” that I learned the full story of how a local hero had been falsely accused of the crime and it wasn’t until seven years later that they finally arrested Eric Rudolph and charged him with the Centennial Park bombing as well as several others. But for almost three months, Richard Jewell, a temporary security guard working the Olympic venue, was hounded almost to death when he was falsely accused by the FBI and his name leaked to the press.
The movie is based on the true story of Richard Jewell and the asinine “profiler”thinking that led the FBI to consider Jewell the prime suspect in the bombing. Paul Walter Hauser plays Richard Jewell, first seen as a supply clerk in a law firm. It is here that Jewell meets lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), and a loose friendship is established. By the time we see Jewell ten years later, he has been fired from one job as a police deputy and is then fired from his security job at Piedmont College – mostly for over-zealousness. It has always been Jewell’s dream to work in law enforcement and he spends his spare time reading penal codes and taking training in police tactics.
But Jewell is a strange dude. He still lives with his mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) who clearly sees him as her pride and joy. The world has another take. Jewell is obese (Director Clint Eastwood urged Hauser to “pack on the pounds” to play this role) and people have disdain for his size. He is also slow to speak, considering the ramifications of things he might say. And his slow and easy manner may be mistaken for dim-wittedness. But he is not dumb by any stretch of the imagination. When the FBI try to trick him into signing a confession, he is smart enough to insist on a lawyer. The only lawyer he knows is Bryant – who has since gone into solo practice.
In fact, Jewell took his job so seriously that he is the one who noticed the backpack left near a bench below the TV tower at Centennial Park. No surprise. He was constantly on the lookout for suspicious behavior and suspicious looking characters. Had he been less serious about his job and seen it only as a temporary assignment – and not a glamorous one – he probably never would have spotted the bag and many more lives would have been lost. He was, in fact, a hero.
On the night of the bombing, FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) is assigned to cover the concerts at Centennial Park. And at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, crime reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) is also assigned to cover it, despite her resistance to do something so demeaning. This is significant because it is proposed that Shaw leaked the name of Jewell as a suspect to Scruggs – who later published Jewell’s name in the paper with giant headlines. Jewell’s life was thereafter a nightmare. Whether Scruggs traded sex for the information was a subject of great controversy when the film came out. And perhaps it is for this reason that “Richard Jewell” did not really show up at the 2020 Oscars. Granted, there was a lot of mighty competition last year – Leonardo DiCaprio (“Once Upon a Time…), Antonio Banderas (“Pain and Glory”), Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”), Adam Driver (“Marriage Story”) and Jonathan Pryce (“The Two Popes”). Hauser, to my mind, should have been nominated – especially in a year when three of the nominees were not even in major released films: Banderas, Driver and Pryce. Of course, it’s the same year that “The Irishman” with its cast of old timers was clearly a made-for-TV movie. Who could sit through a three-hour epic in a theater? Reclining seats, notwithstanding. At lest Kathy Bates received an Oscar for her supporting role as Jewell’s mother Bobi.
In any event, you would not be wasting your time watching “Richard Jewell.” The cast is excellent and the story uncomfortably poignant. When our powerful institutions like the FBI and the press abuse their power, nothing good can come of it. That makes this film that much more relevant in today’s environment. Attacks on the innocent and the defenseless hurt us all. Jewell was no fool. He knew that he was the butt of people’s jokes – based on his weight, his earnestness, his passion for service, and his sincerity. Frankly, he took it all with grace and never let go of his dream of being in law enforcement. He was only 44 when he died of complications of diabetes. Before his death he was a Merriweather County deputy sheriff and trained officers in fire arms.
McVitty Movie Reviews 