Richard Jewell (2019)

Genre: Biographical / Drama

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Paul Walker Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde

Running Time: 129 minutes

This film is inspired by the true events of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, during the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, and their aftermaths. It showed how security guard Richard Jewell, who found and reported the suspicious package responsible and then helped evacuate people to reduce the damage, was later suspected by the FBI to be the main suspect.

The performances of Paul Walker Hauser, Sam Rockwell and Kathy Bates are clear highlights here. They carried that film. They made you care for their characters. Olivia Wilde did the best she could with what she was given. Her performance as Kathy Scruggs, the real-life reporter who first exposed Jewell as the prime suspect of the bombing, was a little big, but it is clear the filmmakers were not going for subtlety here. Scruggs was to be seen as the “bad guy”, whether it was justified or not.

In that sense, this film had a clear agenda: Defending Richard Jewell’s honour once and for all. The performances on screen did a great job at making us feel sympathy for a man whose life was ruined by a witch hunt that left its mark.

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