HERO FILM SERIES STRIKES AGAIN

EASTWOOD FILM REFLECTS TRUTH OF REAL LIFE EVENT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Clint Eastwood puts another biopic story about American heroism to film with the telling of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing.

Richard Jewell (2019), played by Paul Walter Hauser, explains how a security guard gets blamed for the bombing.

Hauser plays a bumbling well meaning, but misdirected, rent a cop, although Jewell’s truth eventually proves to be smarter than the FBI.

John Hamm plays the FBI lead investigator put in charge of collecting evidence on Jewell. Jewell had discovered the bomb in a backpack just minutes before detonation.

Eastwood makes the struggle for truth seem so obvious with a linear narrative that runs just the right length, with just the right amount of character development and plot before the conclusion.

The film does lack a dramatic reversal, but in a way, the film fittingly has an anti-climactic finish, reflecting the lack of an evidentiary foundation for the FBI to press charges against Jewell.

Eastwood shows how the story is almost entirely media driven because the police need a quick answer under the international spotlight of the Olympic Games.  

Olivia Wilde plays the no holds barred journalist. Wilde was Bobby Cannavale’s Vinyl (2016) co-star in the HBO television series about the music industry.

Sam Rockwell plays the victim’s lawyer. Kathy Bates plays the hero’s mother. The actors do a good job cast together, but ultimately the film is a filmmaker’s film.

Eastwood tells stories with realism, often brutally authentic depicting the reality of any given story. In The Mule (2018) Eastwood stars and directs in a film about an elderly gentleman who gets recruited by drug traffickers to transport drugs. The film intentionally has a slow pace with many scenes depicting Eastwood driving back and forth until he gets arrested for trafficking.

In Richard Jewell, the truth of the story gets bumped up by professionals more concerned about their careers than the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Eastwood keeps the story simple, but he still works for the theatre ticket money by drawing on his experience behind the camera to tell the interesting story.

Different camera shots hold the audience’s attention.

Eastwood also experiments with narrative speed by switching from slow to fast to frantic and then to slow again as if mimicking the detonation of an improvised explosive device.

As well, a dramatized scene gives way to faster news reel footage of American sprinter Michael Johnson winning the 200 metres for double Olympic gold.

One symbolic scene depicts Jewell’s mirror image while talking to his lawyer on the phone. Eastwood switches from Jewell in the mirror to Jewell’s lawyer and then back to Jewell sitting in the room without the use of the mirror.

Then later in the film, Eastwood experiments with different time sequences.

The score is good, but the music accompanies the plot and does not really drive the narrative.

The surround sound does cleverly provide depth to the film, by making doors closing on the left only emitting sound from the left, and by camera shutters from the media scrum clicking distinctively independent of the movie sound track, thereby drawing the audience closer into the story by creating the feeling of being at the media event.

Richard Jewell is a well directed film with the use of aesthetics as an instrument painting the reality until the raw truth is revealed.

The Eastwood series of films about American heroes could be made more complicated, but Eastwood makes the dramatization as real as possible and as close to the truth of life and the truth of the acts of heroism as possible.

Eastwood documents the facts, but the director also keeps one eye on the entertainment value of the film so that people will go to theaters to watch those stories of heroes that often go untold.