Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates, Nina Arianda, Eric Mendenhall, Mitchell Hoog, David Shae.

“Get it first, but first get it right“, these words of journalistic lore have somehow become lost in the advent of wall to wall news coverage, the search for constant ratings, and the salaciousness that can be relayed to a baying public who have forgotten the meaning of seeing any breaking headline and then dismissing what the article has to say.

This is not a new approach to dictating the news to the people, using a particular phrase over and over again until it sticks in the mind of the public as indisputable fact, but it is surely one that now sees television anchors and certain journalists as media stars rather than the carriers of responsible reporting that made people such as Dan Rather, the legendary Walter Cronkite, Walter Robinson, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein all figures of authority and not peddlers of speculation and gossip mongers.

There are too many instances of a newspaper, of television news channel deciding to chase a particular angle because of the ratings it will ensure, and even one is too many if it causes distress, anguish and takes one life due to the pressure of the wrong person being accused of a crime just because someone has taken a disliking to them. A word whispered in the wrong ear, a name mentioned as if we have fallen into a parallel world in which the Stasi or the Gestapo secretly takes names born out of petty vengeance from a disgruntled citizen.

Richard Jewell might not be a name instantly recognisable in Britain, but he is just one of many who had their lives ruined because of a newspaper expose to which had no relevance, no meaning, to the actual atrocity that had taken place. The problem lays in what is considered to be society’s view of what makes a person interesting, what it believes to be a hero, that nobody can do anything in life without wanting to be the centre of attention.

The point Clint Eastwood drives home in the film Richard Jewell is not that of the story of the bomber who maliciously and wantonly killed and maimed people on the eve of the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, it is that, in the eyes of the press, of the F.B.I., in one particular person’s view, Richard Jewell didn’t fit the profile of a hero, instead he was the so-called perfect candidate to be the man who committed the despicable act of terrorism.

To look at Richard Jewell from a distance it is easy to see why the press, orchestrated perhaps by the narrative set by law enforcement, broadcast loudly by news outlets and Kathy Scruggs in particular and echoed in the clamour for restorative justice by a grieving, angry nation, wanted to believe that he was the man, one who perhaps suffered from a hero complex in their eyes, who looked every bit the disenfranchised loner who would destroy, rather than the awkward man who found relationships hard to come by but who took pride in his work. It is in this observation that Richard Jewell stands out as a film of the way we mock those we don’t understand, and we should be ashamed of the way we treat people like Richard Jewell.

With a stunning performance by Paul Walter Hauser as the titular character, and with excellent support from Sam Rockwell as his lawyer Watson Bryant, Jon Hamm as an amalgamation of the F.B.I. investigator’s involved and Olivia Wilde as the peddler of the narrative, Kathy Scruggs, Richard Jewell is a film of consequence, one that sees that original maxim and warning to journalists the world over to not destroy that which they cannot understand.

Richard Jewell will leave you heartbroken for the man, which will leave you angry at the way society behaves when they have the scent of blood in their nostrils.

Ian D. Hall