‘Richard Jewell’ review: Clint Eastwood’s seething reminder that sometimes, the fake-news rap is legit

[Valin]

Chicago Tribune

Michael Phillips

Dec 04, 2019

“Richard Jewell” is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-year-old director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways. You may loathe parts of it, and still come out shaken and teary-eyed. You can choose to read it apolitically, if you squint hard enough. But we’ll get to that.

Bolstered by its cast — the culminating scenes get all the finesse they require from Paul Walter Hauser, Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell — it tells the story of how a hungry, sloppy media and a sloppy, hungry FBI nearly destroyed the life of an Atlanta security guard. Jewell was suspected, wrongly, of planting a pipe bomb killing two and injuring more than 100 amid the 1996 Summer Olympics. For a time after his exoneration, the suspect’s nightmare became known as “the Jewell syndrome." In other words: rush to judgment. Innocence presumed guilty.

(Snip)

The project was in development well before the political twist of 2016. Early on, “Captain Phillips” director Paul Greengrass, a left-leaning progressive, planned to make it. As with Eastwood’s “Sully," along with many other Eastwood pictures, “Richard Jewell” stands up for the old-fashioned, law-and-order, God-and-country white male, under siege and undercut by bureaucratic idiocy and enemies of the people. In the spirit of Eastwood’s biggest hit to date, "American Sniper,” “Richard Jewell” isn’t interested in a multifaceted or fully truthful depiction of its battle-tested survivor. The battle, for Jewell, (who died in 2007, from various health crises) was on the home front. The enemy was us. The actors transcend the simplifications, and make Eastwood’s 38th feature behind the camera something worth arguing about.

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[Valin]

 

[Valin]

 

delavalmilker 1 year ago

"Movies today are made for 16 year olds and China".  Pretty much sums it up.

Occasionally movies get made for adults today