Dakota Beacon

Whatever the case may be for making a movie about Richard Jewell, the alleged perpetrator (until his exculpation) of the Atlanta Olympic Games bombing in 1996, it is impossible to watch such a movie in these times through a non-political lense. Hollywood has politicized everything from car-wax to toenail polish, so this circumstance might not, in itself, constitute a fair mark against Eastwood's latest heat-and-light bill. The last movie I saw before this, Knives Out, couldn't be a plain, old-fashioned whodunnit without first dunking its audience in a baptism of wokeness, so it's not like Clint is by his lonesome. But that being the case, that Hollywood has made everything political (“We are Groot!”), and since the Left officially took over Hollywood when John Wayne dismounted his last saddle, it's all the more incumbent upon that Last of the Mohicans (or, I suppose, any Mohican who's eked it in the underbrush and is still operating a camera) to be as unlike Hollywood as possible!!!!

The reason is that otherwise you're stuck either swimming in the  sea of their movies (if you're a right-winger or a centrist) or beaching on the lame archipelago of our movies. Here, the Left has the upper hand, because you can watch your crappy Rom-Com or Marvel junk and take their political pills in small doses and who cares? There's a CGI 600-foot animitron with chiseled male upper-body-shaped armor battling it out with a huge exo-skeleton with AK-47s for arms and one of them wants to save humanity and one of them will attempt to destroy the universe for as many installments as the market can consume and, yeah, a few woke jokes are part of the “fun” or whatever. 

But when you want to watch a movie that potrays reality, then the politicization really matters. And there are only two ways of telling the story of a bumbling, thuggish, all-powerful FBI framing an overweight sap who did nothing other than save a few lives. The right way and the Left way. There's a reason why mainstream Hollywood sat on this one for 23 years. There's also a reason why the Last Of cranked it out now.

And that is why a conventional movie review isn't appropriate for this cinematic outing. In fact, it's probably no longer appropriate for any movie, for reasons sketched in above paragraphs.

How can a movie-goer look at this movie other than as political commentary? And, as the FBI sucessfully fobbed off its “evidence” in the laps of a salivating Congress to impeach our current president, how can said movie-goers not see the parallel between Jewell and Trump – or rather, between the FBI's high-handed, arrogant, cynical treatment of Trump and theirs of Jewell. And this difference might be a clue to why the movie is tanking so badly.  What if the Trumpets don't like seeing their hero identified with a mortally obese wannabe cop? What if Clint Eastwood, in his ancient idealism, didn't realize that the mindless boobs who attend Trump rallies couldn't ever sympathize with a loser, and rejected the one movie that has dared, in the midst of the obscene FBI “investigation” into the Trump's dealing with the Ukraine, to portray the “Deep State” in a negative light?

Richard Jewell is not a bad movie. It actually does a damn good job of showing the thirteen people in America who still care what devastation a thug state can wreak on whomever it wants to, whenever it wants to, and with no more justification than whatever cockamamie “theory” it chooses to pursue as is its pleasure. I would argue that its theme is so potent that even a hack like Clint Eastwood couldn't ruin it with his arsenal of directorial cliches, because what the FBI did to that man and his mother is so believably cynical as to shine its truth brightly through the darkest glass.

I'm not going to review the movie. I'll make a couple points. Kathy Bates was utterly convincing as the bewildered and humiliated mother. No accusation of spin (or “agenda” as they say on Rotten Tomatoes) will lessen her verisimiltude. The protagonist, played by Paul Walter Hauser, did a bang-up job as a muddled, dim-witted, conscientious law-officionado. Beyond those two, the rest of the cast pretty much plugged it in, and that wasn't really their fault. There was a confrontaton scene between the lawyer (Sam Rockwell) in which the latter couldn't deal with the former's lack of indgnation, and had the writing and directing been better it might have arguably been powerful, but under the eagle eye of Eastwood it was underplayed and a whole lot of who cares.

I'm glad Clint Eastwood made this movie. Not because it's a great movie. It's not a lousy movie either.  I think it's both propagandistic and honest at the same time. Not propagandistic in the sense of being state-approved, but in the sense of extracting a moral from a political situation, i.e. the state is trying to ruin your life and that's not right.

What's more important than some nobody's review of this movie is how bad it's tanking! How could a movie that casts the Federales in such a bad light go so wrong in a climate in which the mistrust and fear of the State is so high!!!!

This type of question is why I reiterate that the traditional movie review is no longer appropriate, at least for this type of movie – a political movie. The particulars of acting and directing become irrelevant, like the retreating decimals in a function which approaches its limit as x approaches zero.

I can only conjecture that the failure of this movie at the box office is due to some force related to a cosmic scrambling of critical reception of data, just as was the success of Trump at the polls. These two seemingly unrelated manfestations of irrationality are related.

The plebiscite likes him God-like. If he were God-like, the FBI couldn't play him like a Victrola.

I could be wrong. My point is, with a movie like this, where all you know is it's political, it stops being important whether the movie is “well-made,” whether the actors are good, whether the script is good. None of that matters if you're watching propaganda.

It's too bad, and it's not even Clint Eastwood's fault. Maybe what he wanted to do was beyond Herculean. But the way I see it, every second of film he rolled has been repudiated by the American peoples' lack of interest, and that is the story.

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