EASTWOOD’S LATEST LARGELY IGNORED IN OSCAR CONTEST

By Dominique Paul Noth

From left: Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates and Paul Walter Hauser in
'Richard Jewell.'

Ever since 1992’s The Unforgiven won every award in sight, serious and casual filmgoers have accepted Clint Eastwood as a legitimate, crisp and meaningful movie director.   While sometimes his persona of talking to chairs and arguing right wing stances have led to a weird public image, his best movies have often explored the misguided attitudes that establishment society has visited on the individual, in ways that reinforce the centrality of the American experience.  That’s aside from just being a good storyteller in films like Mystic River.

Sometimes his own feelings and his subject’s history bring out a confusing film – American Sniper, torn between bloodbaths and interior strife, springs to mind – but sometimes his sense of society’s tendency to pigeonhole people who stand up for justice touches the audience.  This was true of Changeling, Gran Torino, Sully and should have been true about his current Richard Jewell, which explores the fate of an ATT security guard whose discovery and positive actions on finding a backpack in an Atlanta concert stadium during the 1996 Olympics may have saved lives but instead with no evidence saw him vilified for months  by the media and the FBI as the terrorist who planted the bomb.

It was false. The porky unaware Jewell who so identified with law and order (a believably dense performance by Paul Walter Hauser) was easily painted as excessive wannabe. He and his family suffered months of abuse and hatred.  The story has even deeper resonance today, whether Eastwood intended the political wrinkles, when money, the media and the confused government can so readily accuse people by sheer volume of attack about being corrupt when they’re not or terrorist linked when they’re not.

But whether it’s because Eastwood’s attitude toward media and his experience with the media have been permanently or temporarily over-simplified, the film blows its possibilities.  It suggests that a horny FBI agent (Jon Hamm) and a promiscuous reporter (Olivia Wilde) from the Atlanta Journal Constitution did Jewell in as opposed to exploring what is built into  – and redoubled into today’s Internet world – that so easily makes society run off the rails of common sense. 

In reducing the story to some offbeat humor and some pointed barbs at media methods, Eastwood limited its attention by Oscar to one good but typical performance in the supporting actress category by Kathy Bates. It’s nice but nothing a solid actress hasn’t proven before.  I don’t think it will dislodge the likely winner, Laura Dern (for Marriage Story),  who has had a shining year on big and small screens. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing her dislodged by Florence Pugh’s fine performance as Amy in Little Women.

 Not nominated for Richard Jewell, though in pure watchability they could have been as much as Bates,  were supporting work by Sam Rockwell as the personable and constantly angry composite of the lawyers who went to work for Jewell, and Nina Arianda, a fine US  stage actress using the Ukraine accent of her  parents as his pushy Nadya who keeps warning the lawyer about what police powers can do.

Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray keep relying on actors deepening the cardboard cutouts rather than probing the complicated roots of attitudes our culture was embracing in the 1990s and is further embracing today. 

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

JoJo Rabbit 
Oscar nominated as best picture, supporting actress (Scarlet Johansson), adapted screenplay, production design, film editing and costume design.

Little Women 
Oscar nominated as best picture, best actress (Saoirse Ronan), best supporting actress (Florence Pugh), adapted screenplay, costume design, music.

1917 
Oscar nominated as best picture, director, original screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, music.

Dark Waters, The Report and Just Mercy.  (The last treated as a 2020 release.)

The Two Popes
Oscar nominated as best actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay.

Joker
Oscar nominated best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing, makeup, music, cinematography, costume design.

Ford v Ferrari
Oscar nominated best picture, film editing, sound editing.

The Irishman
Oscar nominated for best picture, best supporting actors, film editing, production design.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Oscar nominated for best supporting actor

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.