Richard Jewell - great

I agree. Much better than anticipated.

I viewed Richard Jewell on the Saturday of its opening weekend, and I found it "great" as well. It is the most absorbing movie that I have seen among 2019 releases, and the performances—especially from Paul Walter Hauser (as Jewell) and Sam Rockwell—are exceptional. If Hauser and Rockwell do not receive Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for their flawless, nuanced performances, that result would be a shame. Clint Eastwood directs the film simply, intimately, and unpretentiously, seamlessly weaving humor into a darkly ironic story. I noted in the thread about Dark Waters that one of the strengths of that movie was how it largely avoided conventional Hollywood melodrama and theatrics, suffering only the slight and rare lapse in that regard (for instance, a shot with a should-be horizontal image that is tilted vertically in a gratuitous attempt to convey disillusion). In Richard Jewell, there are no lapses. The film represents one of the most fatalistic stories in recent American history, a bittersweet mix of heroism and tragedy, friendship and false presumption.

Above all, Richard Jewell is a character study and a study in the dangers of profiling. Eastwood has tackled the latter subject before, in the underrated 1999 film True Crime. In that one, the victim of profiling was a black man, played by Isaiah Washington, with a checkered past. Assuming that he was the killer, based on a cursory look at his profile and some circumstantial evidence, proved all too easy, all too glib. In Richard Jewell, conversely, the victim of profiling is a white man. Assuming that Jewell was the bomber, based on some aspects of his profile, proved all too easy, all too glib, given some of his quirks and past missteps. And of course, that is exactly what the FBI investigators and certain media outlets did back in 1996. There is, in Richard Jewell, a certain cry for dignity, but it comes from a soft-spoken and overweight man reluctant to speak up for himself. To those profiling him, that reluctance made him seem all the more guilty. 

Here, Eastwood paints in eloquent, minimalist strokes, allowing knowing looks and simple dialogue to reverberate deeply. That is never more so than in the coda of Richard Jewell, which is quietly resonant and beautiful. As a director, Eastwood has long excelled at codas, dating back to his directorial Westerns from the 1970s, High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Richard Jewell is one of his best in that regard, with the laconic, understated, mutually respectful exchange between Hauser and Rockwell perhaps vaguely reminiscent of that between Eastwood and John Vernon at the close of Josey Wales. In short, the coda 'clinches' the overall film. 

I plan to see it again this weekend. 

(And regarding the subject of profiling, there is actually a deeper connection to Eastwood's cinematic past. In his first American movie as a star, Hang 'Em High [Ted Post, 1968], he played a cowboy falsely accused and lynched by a vigilante mob.)

What do you get when you try to make a srs movie out of Mall Cop? You get the Atlanta bombong!. But in all srsness what was up with those FBI? It seemed like they got bit by a special zombie that causes a desire to frame innocent people in the most idiotic ways possible, like on the level of "let's wait until the guy's lawyer has left the room so we can try to trick him with donuts" absurdity. Maybe they can take a tip from the democratic party impeachment playbook!

Nice movie overall. The crying bit at the end materialized the whole film for me.

Having viewed Richard Jewell again, there is a "classic" or "classical" quality to it. Some shots are stylish, but the stylishness is subtle and brief: an early closeup of the video game gun, wielded by Jewell, surrounded by darkness and pointed toward the camera; in the following scene, a quick subjective tracking shot around a corner, from Jewell's point of view, toward the desk where Watson Bryant is working—darkness illuminated by a desk lamp with a glowing green cover; much later, a short exterior shot of Jewell's mother, played by Kathy Bates, peering between blinds in an image that is quite haunting; later still, after Jewell and Bryant depart the FBI's formal interview, a lingering closeup of the bureau's seal, which Jewell has just discussed. 

Speaking of Bates, she too is excellent, and I am not sure that there is a film from 2019 that features a pair of performances as stellar as Hauser and Rockwell. Perhaps DiCaprio and Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood would be in the discussion, albeit in a very different mode of performance for a very different style of movie. And then there would be DeNiro and Pacino (or Pesci) in The Irishman, along with the satirical Pattinson and Dafoe in The Lighthouse, but for naturalism and nuance, I would have to go with Hauser and Rockwell. 

Overall, Richard Jewell can bring a smile to one's face and a tear to one's eye almost simultaneously, and that feat is not easy to achieve.

what were they doing then? They made him record his voice saying theres a bomb in centennial park.

Because no competent lawyer would've allowed their client to do that. It would be so easy to have a "mixup" in the original tapes and somehow Jewell's recording ends up being labeled as the original tape and then the FBI could claim the voices matched.