Richard Jewell

MOVIE #1,067 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.18.23 THIS IS A JOINT REVIEW WITH 2021's SPENCER In many ways, this was the perfect double feature: a pair of recent(ish) biopics made in opposing styles, one on a topic I was vastly interested in, and another which I wasn’t at all. 2019’s Richard Jewell by Clint Eastwood is indicative of his recent work: it’s competent and informative and just entertaining enough (though so visually flat, it almost has no style at all). And on the flipside, Pablo Larraín’s Princess Di Christmas movie Spencer is largely all-style (what substance is mostly imagined, fictionalized to the point of it being labeled a “fable” at the onset of the film).

For the latter, I had to pivot about 45 minutes in and start thinking of it as a story about “a woman in trouble” (in the INLAND EMPIRE sense) and not a biopic about the Royal Family, which is just something I couldn’t give less of a shit about. Honestly, on the “Less of a Shit Pantheon,” they are at the very very top (or bottom feels more appropriate — this Pantheon is a pit and I’ve kicked this trash in it first). Equal parts insufferable and uninteresting, those blokes.

Though it was amazing how much drama they were able to milk out of a story which is essentially “lady doesn’t want to eat dinner with her in-laws.” And Kristen Stewart does (somehow) manage to transcend ‘Kristen Stewart doing a Princess Diana’ impression, which when you first see her on screen feels impossible. So, needless to say, I was able to enjoy this one much more than I anticipated at the onset. It’s well-acted and its lovely 16mm cinematography gave it a timeless vibe which really worked.

Conversely, my appreciation for Eastwood’s Jewell worked in a totally different manner. I was invested in the story from the get-go. I remember the Olympic bombing and subsequent hoopla surrounding the titular character but I was just a tween when it happened, so all of the details of this fascinating saga felt fresh to me. And I was able to overlook some of the bad writing (Olivia Wilde’s characters is a total mess) and stock pandering and/or exaggerated biopic stuff. Plus, Paul Walter Hauser is the real deal, and I’m not sure if the film would have worked at all with a lesser actor in the role.

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Richard Jewell is a 2019 American biographical drama film directed and produced by Clint Eastwood and written by Billy Ray. It is based on the 1997 Vanity Fair article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner and the 2019 book The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen. The film depicts the July 27 Centennial Olympic Park bombing and its aftermath, as security guard Richard Jewell finds a bomb during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, and alerts authorities to evacuate, only to later be wrongly accused of having placed the device himself. The film stars Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell, alongside Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, and Olivia Wilde. It was released on November 20, 2019 .