Direction: Clint Eastwood
Country: USA
Once again (after J.Edgar, American Sniper, and Sully), reputable director Clint Eastwood got inspired by real events, putting out another biographical drama, this time centered on Richard Jewell, the security guard and police officer who, in the space of three days, went from national hero to main suspect of the bombing of the Centennial Olympic Park at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jewell, majestically embodied by Paul Walter Hauser, likes to state he’s a law enforcer. And that’s exactly what he is. Passionate about it and attentive to detail, this fast-food junkie is also a gun expert and a sharpshooter who believes in protecting people. He takes his job very seriously, and you can picture him as that sort of obsessive, overzealous guy whom everybody makes fun of. Yet, on the hot night of July 27, 1996, his suspicion about a green backpack lying underneath a bench in the cited park led to a partial evacuation of the place, avoiding hundreds of casualties and injuries in a terrorist attack.
With the manipulative FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) at the center of the investigation, Jewell is made a suspect with no reason other than his past and the sloppy assumption that he fits the profile of the lone bomber. The help comes from Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), a pragmatic lawyer who had briefly crossed paths with Jewell in 1986, time when the film's narrative begins.
Eastwood and his writer Billy Ray (Captain Phillips; The Hunger Games) faced fierce contestation from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution newspaper for the way they outlined the methods used by late reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) in order to obtain relevant information.
Polemics aside, the director, prompted by an immediate and fluid storytelling, mounted some scenes that not always feel authentic. However, he makes a clear-eyed look about the failings and transgressions of American law enforcement agencies in their urgency to find a culprit. Hauser fuels this uneven account with an excellent performance.
