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Richard Jewell

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Paul Asay

Movie Review

He just wanted to help people.

Ever since he was a boy growing up in Georgia, Richard Jewell looked up to law enforcement. While other kids were dreaming of becoming astronauts or basketball stars, Richard wanted to wear a badge, and for a time he did (until he was fired). Since then, he’s been a security guard off and on, which he likes just fine when a job comes along. But Richard always imagined that he was meant to do something more with his life. Something better. Something bluer.

Sure, he doesn’t look like a police officer: He carries a few extra pounds. But his ample girth is paired with unmatched enthusiasm. He reads police manuals in his spare time. He’s a better shot than Wyatt Earp ever was. And Richard believes it’d be just a matter of time before he gets another opportunity at wearing a real police badge again.

So when the Olympic Games come to Atlanta, with their overwhelming need for security personnel, Richard thinks it just might be his ticket back in the game. Maybe he’s just a security guard. But he’ll be the best one he could be.

On July 27, Richard shoos off some drunken kids from the side of a building when he spots an unattended backpack in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, where the Olympics’ nightly concerts are held. When he points it out to police on scene, they figure it’s full of beer or snacks for the kids. With so many visitors in Atlanta, some of ‘em are bound to leave their belongings behind. To think it’s a bomb? That’s just crazy, the cops say.

“I’d rather be crazy than wrong right now,” Richard says.

Turns out, he’s not crazy. And he’s not wrong. The experts find three massive pipe bombs. Minutes later, they explode: Two people die. More than 100 are injured. But it could’ve been worse, much, much worse, had it not been for Richard Jewell.

For three days, the security guard is a hero.

But soon the FBI begins to wonder: Is he? Agents Tom Shaw and Dan Bennet are determined to find out.

The president of Piedmont College tells tells them that Richard was trouble when he worked for the school, with a file full of complaints. An FBI profiler believes that Richard fits a “lone bomber” archetype: a frustrated, wanna-be police officer who plants a bomb just so he can discover it later—and then soak in all the accolades.

But Shaw and Bennet aren’t the only ones looking for a bomber. Kathy Scruggs, bulldog reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is, too. She and Agent Shaw know each other. Know each other well. She knows a well-placed word and a well-timed touch will pry her scoop loose—the identity of the prime suspect. No sacrifice, no matter how intimate, is too great for her next front-page splash.

Richard Jewell just wanted to help people. And he did.

Just wait ’til he gets his reward.

Positive Elements

The Richard Jewell in Richard Jewell is a hero—one with his share of faults and quirks, to be sure, but one to whom many owe their lives. And as he goes through the bombing aftermath’s earliest stages, he’s humble about his role. He was just doing his job, he tells a reporter: The real heroes are the policemen who risked their own lives creating a perimeter and diving headlong into the bomb’s bloody aftermath. Richard even gives credit to the drunken kids he was chasing, too: Had they not knocked the bag over, the bomb would’ve sprayed its contents (nails and screws) out, rather than up. Many more might’ve been injured or died.

When Richard goes from hero to suspect, though, he and the few folks in his inner circle show their true qualities. Richard’s mother, Bobbie, fears for and suffers greatly for her son. “I don’t know how to protect you from these people,” she weepily tells him. His lawyer, Watson Bryant, was a former associate of Richard’s—one of the few, Richard admits, who treated him like a real person. And he fills the same role here, doing his best to humanize a man being demonized in public.

As for Richard himself … well, he cooperates with the authorities to a literal fault (much to Watson’s exasperation). He helps his mom soldier through this difficult time, too. And he carries himself with a modicum of grace, rarely losing his temper. It’s impossible to escape the reality that underneath all his oddities and foibles, he’s just an honest-to-goodness nice guy. He can’t be anything but.

Let’s not forget about the story’s designated “villains.” Tom Shaw, the FBI agent pursuing Richard with the most enthusiasm, does so out of a legitimate desire to find the bomber. The bomb went off on his watch, after all, and he pursues who legitimately seems, at first, to be the most likely culprit. His is a sin of excess enthusiasm and dogged determination—qualities that in many another cops-and-criminals-based movie, makes the pursuant a hero, not a villain. (Indeed, you could argue that he and Richard share some of the same vices.) And while reporter Kathy Scruggs’ original motives are not so honorable, she too wants to find the real culprit. When she begins to doubt Richard’s role in the bombings, we see her regret for her own role in defaming him.

Spiritual Elements

In the aftermath of the bombing, Kathy Scruggs offers one of the strangest prayers I’ve heard on screen. “Dear God, let us find [the bomber] before anyone else does,” she says, holding hands with a fellow reporter. And, she adds with a profanity, let the guy be interesting.

Watson asks Richard if he belongs to any religious cults or fringe organizations. “Not unless the Baptists are a religious cult,” he says with a smile.

Sexual Content

There’s been no shortage of controversy over how Kathy Scruggs, a real reporter who broke and covered the Richard Jewell story, has been portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s movie. We can only say that Eastwood’s version of Kathy will do anything—anything—to get a story.

She wears provocative clothing, hoping that it might prove an effective conduit to loosen her sources’ lips. She mulls breast augmentation surgery. And when we first see her with Agent Tom Shaw, it’s clear the two already know each other well. She dances beside him in Centennial Park and encourages him to dance with her.

After the bombing, Kathy and Tom meet in a bar. In so many words, she offers to have sex with him in exchange for help with her story—promising that she won’t publish anything without corroborating information. (That winds up being a lie, one of many she tells.) She hints that other sources have fed her information regarding the bombing, and Tom insinuates that she likely procured that information from her other “informants” in the same way she’s trying to get it from him: through sex. She doesn’t deny it, but after they engage in a bit of clothed foreplay at the bar (no other way to describe it, really), Tom tells her they’re looking at Richard Jewell as the bomber. She informs him that they can still have sex, but that information puts a clock on their intimacy: She suggests either getting a room at a nearby hotel or just doing the deed in a car.

As the investigation begins to fall apart, the FBI advances a theory that Richard had an accomplice, perhaps his “homosexual lover.” Richard is pretty indignant about the suggestion: During a formal interview with the FBI, when Tom asks him why he wanted to work in Centennial Park, Richard makes it a point to say that he had a good vantage point to “look at the pretty girls.” He then emphasizes that he’s “not a homosexual.”

Bobbie is pretty upset when FBI agents take her “underthings.” Watson rubs noses with and kisses his assistant, Nadya (whom we learn he later married).

Violent Content

The bomb goes off, and we see both the explosion and its aftermath. The blast throws people back, and we see and hear nails thud and stick in a piece of modern art. Dozens and dozens of people are struck by the shrapnel, and they groan and cry in the grass as first responders buzz around the scene. One woman lies, apparently dead, in a pool of her own blood as her daughter implores her to move. Others bleed from various injuries.

In a dream sequence, Richard relives the explosion and throws himself on top of the bomb before it goes off.

As a security guard, Richard bumps a student in his Piedmont College dorm room, knocking him down. (The incident gets him fired.) He and a friend talk over the incident while firing guns at a shooting range. He gets a high score while playing a shooting game at a video arcade, too, and we see some crude, pixelated figures expire on screen. We learn that he reads tactical manuals (some of which he admits are controversial), and he owns scads of guns, including some assault rifles. He places all his weapons on his bed at Watson’s request, so the FBI—collecting evidence from she and Bobbie’s apartment—won’t find any “surprises.” When Watson sees all the weapons, he asks Richard if he’s preparing for a zombie invasion.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear more than 30 uses of the f-word and nearly 15 of the s-word. We also hear “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and “pr–k.” Someone flashes a pair of middle fingers. God’s name is misused a dozen times, five of those with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused another nine times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Tom and Kathy meet at a bar twice. During the second meeting, Kathy tosses down the rest of a drink that Tom left behind, then orders another. Characters drink wine and beer, too.

Richard barges into a dorm room where beer is present—a definite no-no, according to the college rules. (Despite the presence of alcohol, Richard is later fired for harassing the students.) We learn that Richard sometimes stopped students before they ever got to campus in an effort to keep alcohol off the grounds—despite having no official jurisdiction. In Centennial Park, he tries to deal with a clutch of drunken, unruly youth who mock him in return. He sees someone pull beer out of a suspicious backpack.

Other Negative Elements

Few professions are more systematically denigrated than that of the so-called “rent-a-cop,” employees paid to keep order but without the weight of the law or the authority of a badge to enforce that order. Overweight, overly sincere Richard is doubly a target. We see him, essentially, bullied by some of the same people he tries to reprimand and even protect. Sometimes the people he most looks up to—policemen and FBI agents—mock him, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. On a couple of occasions, he tells Watson just what folks sometimes call him, and he admits that it hurts.

Tom and other FBI officials lie to Richard and work around his attorney in order to get the suspect to incriminate himself. (They initially bring him in for questioning under the pretext of a “training video,” and attempt to get him to sign a waiver dismissing his Miranda rights through chicanery, too.) Kathy’s guilty of her own fibs in her push to claim the story, and at one point she sneaks into Watson’s car and hides on the floor before pouncing on Watson, begging for some inside intel.

Richard suffers from diarrhea the night of the bombing. (He describes it as having “the runs.”) He’s rushing to a porta potty when he encounters the drunken kids and, then, the bomb.

Conclusion

Stories, particularly visual stories like movies, are funny things. Some may want to, say, warn about the evils of alcoholism. But to tell that story, you have to show lots and lots of drinking. Movies that decry violence are often necessarily guilty of portraying that same violence.

The irony at the heart of Richard Jewell is a bit more insidious, in a way. The movie wants us to show how the FBI and the media defamed not only an innocent man, but a man who should’ve been praised as a hero. But in so doing, Director Clint Eastwood is alleged to have defamed a real-life reporter, Kathy Scruggs, for sleeping around to nail down her own stories. “No one has ever said Kathy did anything like that,” said Kevin Riley, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s current editor-in-chief. And unlike Richard Jewell, Kathy is in no position to offer a defense: She died in 2001 of a prescription drug overdose.

I don’t think it was necessary to depict the reporter sleeping around to drive home the point that the press was at least partly at fault for what happened to Richard Jewell. But I wish that if Eastwood wanted to feature such a duplicitous reporter, he would’ve used a composite character, because the controversy surrounding Scruggs detracts from what is otherwise a strong and thoughtful, if profane, movie.

Richard Jewell warns about the dangers of profiling anyone. Eastwood’s latest suggests that judging someone based on appearances and assumptions can lead to injustice and tragedy. And even when justice is ultimately served, the consequences can still linger. Take Richard Jewell, whose name was officially cleared three months after he was accused (and who quietly celebrated, the movie suggests, when the real bomber confessed six years later). But even though he was vindicated, I didn’t immediately remember—until watching the movie’s trailers—whether the real Richard Jewell was guilty or innocent. Accusations of wrongdoing—even if they’re just that, accusations—tend to linger.

Richard Jewell is a sad, gripping and sometimes surprisingly funny film. But the film’s language, along with its questionable treatment of a key character, remind us of the movie’s main point. Not everything is what it seems.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.