Richard Jewell

Jon Hamm exhibits institutional corruption in Richard Jewell

Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell is middlebrow Oscar bait that floundered in the wake of a slut shaming controversy. Namely its slurring of reporter Kathy Scruggs, fiercely played by Olivia Wilde. Scruggs is shown trading her sexual favors for tips on the Jewell investigation from an FBI agent. That the FBI agent is played by Jon Hamm and not, say, John Goodman, makes the exchange more ambivalent. Regardless, this controversy is one of the few intriguing aspects of this film. 

Wilde's performance gives the flick a needed jolt of fizz. Leisurely paced, the film is a mildly involving police procedural. Kathy Bates was justly lauded for her performance as Jewell's mother, but most of the principles lack color amidst Eastwood's po-faced realism. Hamm gets to do his man without a soul schtick again and it is getting tiring. Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell and Sam Rockwell as his lawyer are adequate. The film comes off like a civics lesson and is, as that great existential philosopher Iggy Pop once put it, no fun. 

Perhaps Richard Jewell would have been more suited to the directorial talents of its screenwriter, Billy Ray. Ray's chief theme, at least since Shattered Glass, has been American institutional corruption. Eastwood's direction is unengaged and Richard Jewell functions as a placebo.