With “Richard Jewell,” which opens Friday, Clint Eastwood expands his cinema of tragic consciousness into a new and contentious dimension. The movie develops and transforms the real-life story of Richard Jewell—a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics, in Atlanta, who alerted police to a bomb-filled backpack and, after being hailed as a hero, was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. of having planted the bomb himself. Those suspicions were disclosed to and published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, leading to a nationwide besmirching of Jewell’s name.
Eastwood’s version of Jewell’s story depicts the guard as a naïve and awkward obsessive, a law-enforcement wannabe who, after years of missteps and disappointments, nonetheless shines in a critical moment—the moment that he’d been preparing for his entire life—and whose very idiosyncrasy and exceptionalism cast doubt on his achievement and give rise to his persecution. The director (working with a script by Billy Ray) offers a political fable polished so brightly that it can reflect more or less any prejudice that a viewer brings to it; the movie’s very clarity proves to be the source of a surprising set of ambiguities.
Paul Walter Hauser, whose performance as a clumsy accomplice in “I, Tonya” is among the best recent supporting turns, stars as Jewell, in a role that similarly conjures up complex inner turmoil through quietly heightened gestures and vocal inflections. The tale begins in 1986, in Atlanta, when Jewell, then in his early twenties, works as a mail clerk in a government agency. He’s socially awkward, naïve, yet possessed of good intentions. Jewell is also the butt of jokes at work for being both fat and peculiar, but he’s befriended by one colleague, a cantankerous young lawyer, G. Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), to whom he bluntly and vainly confides—over a first-person-shooter video game at which he’s an ace—his plans for a career in law enforcement. When Jewell finally gets a job in that field, Bryant warns him, “When you get the badge, don’t become an asshole.”
Sure enough, Jewell gets the badge and becomes an asshole. Working as an officer on a college campus, he flaunts his power by pushing students around, pursuing their infractions punctiliously, and stopping cars on the road (where he has no authority) to search for drugs. He’s eventually fired. Mildly aggrieved but also somewhat humbled, he gets a new job, at the Olympics, and fretfully asks his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates), an insurance manager with whom he lives in a small apartment, whether he’s still in law enforcement. She reassures him that he’s still a “good guy warding off the bad guys.”
Jewell is obsessed with the idea of “protecting” people—from what, it’s never quite clear. He sees his mission in the narrowest terms; his hobby is studying the penal code, but he has little sense of the social fabric that it’s meant to preserve. On the evening before the bomb attack, he confronts a group of teen-agers who are drinking behind a shed; they cruelly mock him, and he walks away to their taunts—and calls the police on them. At the Olympics, he fawningly supplies police officers with cans of Coke. He awkwardly offers a pregnant woman a bottle of water. Yet Jewell is quietly haunted; his notion of what it means to protect people combines impossible ideas about “law and order” with a sense of looming chaos and imminent danger. (This sense of danger sometimes feeds off prejudices. When he sees a dark-haired man with an overstuffed backpack, he chases him down, only to find the man extracting cans of beer from it). His ideas about following “protocol” down to the last detail and about the importance of imagining worst-case scenarios converge when he discovers a knapsack under a bench which—after he urges reluctant police officers to take it seriously—a bomb-squad investigation quickly finds to be a deadly menace.
An instant national hero, Jewell is besieged by reporters, interviewed on television, and offered a book deal (complete with a cynical ghostwriter). The book offer prompts the overwhelmed Jewell, who’s offered a contract, to reconnect with Bryant for legal advice. Meanwhile, an F.B.I. agent named Tom Shaw (a fictional character played by Jon Hamm), who was on the scene at the pre-Olympics concert where the knapsack bomb was found, is put in charge of the investigation. He’s presented as being ambitious and frustrated, presuming that his career was meant for greater things than monitoring an Olympics sideshow. He was at the concert in the company of a journalist friend, Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), a furiously ambitious journalist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who’s similarly dismayed about being on mere Olympics duty. (Scruggs was a real-life journalist who reported this story for that paper at the time; she died in 2001.) The head of the Atlanta F.B.I. office puts forth the theory that Jewell—a “frustrated white man” with aspirations to a law-enforcement career—fits the profile of the faux hero, of the arsonist who extinguishes his own fire. Shaw runs with it, luring the credulous and admiring Jewell into the office for questioning under the pretext of making a training video. But Jewell recognizes that the interrogation is real and calls Bryant, who moves swiftly to help him.
The pivot of the movie is a scene that is, appropriately, sparking indignation. Scruggs meets Shaw at a bar, because she has heard that the F.B.I. has a suspect and wants him to leak the name to her. Shaw turns her prompt into a lewd proposition: “You couldn’t fuck it out of them, what makes you think you could fuck it out of me?” Scruggs takes him at his word and runs her hand up his leg. He discloses Jewell’s identity, and, when she asks whether they’ll go to her car or a motel, they leave the bar together. It’s implied that she has sex with a source in exchange for a scoop; those who knew the real-life Scruggs deny that she did any such thing.
It’s an ignominious allegation, and one that Eastwood has no business making, particularly in a movie about ignominious allegations. What’s more, the sex-for-scoop scene appears to serve mainly to plug one particular gap in the story—namely, what would prompt a seemingly dutiful and by-the-book agent such as Shaw to disclose a suspect’s identity to a journalist? The scene suggests a gross failure of imagination on Eastwood’s part, and, moreover, it suggests his gross contempt for the very idea of a female journalist, whose competence he depicts as inseparable from her sexuality—and, for that matter, from her promiscuity. Yet the scene, for all its dramatic insignificance, also sets up a fundamental misogynist dichotomy that’s at the core of the film: the division of women into two camps, mothers and whores. Bobi, Richard’s mother, is fiercely devoted and steadfast in her defense of him. Bryant’s secretary, a Russian woman named Nadya (Nina Arianda), is extraordinarily competent and insightful—and her role as Bryant’s right-hand person is ultimately confirmed when they fall in love, get married, and have a child. The only other woman who figures notably in the action is the pregnant woman to whom Richard offers a bottle of water.
Yet, paradoxically, there is another woman—an ultra-competent and accomplished woman—who’s never mentioned and never seen and yet is obliquely, perhaps unintentionally, implied throughout the movie: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Eastwood has publicly expressed his disdain for her, and I’ve seen suggestions that “Richard Jewell,” in its dubious and damning view of the F.B.I. and of journalism, is Trumpist propaganda. Yet I’m aware of only one candidate whose trivial missteps were inflated by the F.B.I. and other government (i.e., Congressional) officials—and amplified by the press—into an issue that threatened to have grave legal consequences for her and that dominated the coverage of a Presidential election. I’m aware of only one candidate who was the subject of an announcement by the director of the F.B.I., days before the election, regarding a new investigation of her, which suddenly became the dominant theme of a race in which a real miscreant was hiding in plain sight. Jewell even raises—repeatedly—to the F.B.I. the fear that, while they’re wasting time and energy investigating him, the actual bomber is planning to continue his reign of crime.
Another crucial moment in current politics involves a report by a whistle-blower, made through proper channels, which has sparked wild outrage from President Trump and his apologists in his Administration, in Congress, and in the media, who have sought to reveal that person’s identity, threatening legal consequences. This nightmare scenario, of a conscientious official being terrorized for doing a responsible and honorable job, is explicitly raised in “Richard Jewell”: the protagonist, facing his interrogators from the F.B.I., tells them expressly that, even more than he fears for his own well-being and reputation, he fears that police officers or security guards will hesitate to report legitimate threats because they will fear suffering Richard’s fate—and, he says, the result will be catastrophic.
Regardless of Eastwood’s stated political persuasion, “Richard Jewell” is filled with political symbols and iconic moments that spin away from their apparent intentions to yield critical insights—starting with the movie’s frequent and damning use of the term “profiling.” One startling moment in the film involves a shot of a prominently displayed Confederate flag, which then recurs several times in a short span of time. Yet Eastwood is clearly not depicting it approvingly; on the contrary, that flag is shown to be decorating the wall of the F.B.I. field office where Richard shows up, with Bryant, for an interrogation. That flag plays the role of a persecutor’s mark—and, although the F.B.I. is playing a crucial and constructive role in the current investigation of President Trump’s misdeeds, that flag calls attention to the dangers posed by a politicized Bureau, a danger that brings to mind the run-up to the 2016 election, when the F.B.I. was reportedly largely hostile to Clinton’s candidacy (and was even described as “Trumpland”).
The spectre of a white-supremacist F.B.I. is the sole suggestion of overt politics in “Richard Jewell.” It’s never clear what any character’s actual affiliations are, and there isn’t any explicit advocacy for or against a party or a policy. On the other hand, the movie is conspicuously wary of the powers of law enforcement and infused with a fear of demagogy. Its themes are essentially apolitical: suspicion of law enforcement, disdain for any rush to judgment by the media, scrutiny of legal overreach, and skepticism of the power of authorities to coax confessions from fearful suspects. These themes all belong at least as much to the left as to the right—even if Eastwood himself doesn’t. With “Richard Jewell,” Eastwood’s artistry, his cinematic unconscious, imbues this pugnacious drama with urgent present-day observations that outleap its historical context—and maybe even his intentions.
