Richard Jewell movie review & film summary (2019)
It’s not a lure to which the title character is immune. An early scene in this fleet, densely textured drama shows Jewell, played by Paul Walter Hauser with an empathy that seems genuinely lived-in, working as a college security guard. Derisively referred to as a “rent-a-cop” by students, he in turn inappropriately lords it over them. A meeting with a dean ends with the academic saying “Do you want to resign, or would it be better if I fired you?”
Years later, hired as a freelance security guard by AT&T, an Olympic Sponsor, to monitor music events at Centennial Park, Jewell is similarly heavy-handed, which actually proves useful when an actual pipe bomb explodes at an event. His work at securing a perimeter, as the pros call it, actually saves lives, and the less-than-socially adept Jewell is soon talking to Katie Couric on “The Today Show.”
The adulation won’t last. Jon Hamm’s Tom Shaw, an FBI agent who had been at the site when the bomb went off, is assigned to look into Jewell. It’s standard procedure. On-site “heroes” who actually precipitate the event at which they act heroically are sadly not uncommon. But Shaw’s sense of having dropped the ball seems to inspire a rash zealousness. Shaw’s feelings of wanting to have sex with an attractive woman lead him to give Jewell’s name to Kathy Scruggs, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution who has aggressive methods of cultivating sources. On learning that Jewell’s a target, Scruggs, played with nearly-disturbing aggressive exuberance by Olivia Wilde, exclaims “That fat fuck lives with his mother, of course.”
And Jewell, who does indeed live with his mother—played by Kathy Bates, who eventually steals the movie—now sees his life implode. A man with a near-irrational respect for law enforcement, he either looks on dumbly or says the wrong thing as FBI automatons remove his mother’s underwear from their apartment and trembles with mute hurt as Tom Brokaw, who days before had praised him, smugly pronounces that the FBI is close to having enough to “nail” the innocent man. Soon, with the help of G. Watson Bryant, a relatively down-at-his-heels lawyer that Jewell knew when he was a supply clerk—played with such seamlessness by Sam Rockwell that you almost don’t notice just how good he is, which is very—Jewell begins to fight back.
