Richard Jewell: A Bomb Detonates, and a Life Explodes

Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood's "Richard Jewell"

Even when they aren’t appearing in Westerns or war films, Clint Eastwood’s heroes routinely find themselves under siege. Earlier in his everlasting late period, in movies like Invictus and J. Edgar, Eastwood’s principals operated from inside the government, attempting to impose order and decency on a cruel and lawless world. Lately, however, The System itself has become Eastwood’s chief antagonist, a daunting power intent on smearing the names and ruining the lives of good men. In Sully, a skilled and noble pilot found himself the target of a biased and insidious bureaucratic inquiry. Now comes Richard Jewell, which dramatizes the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing and its aftermath, when the country collectively decided—based on hunches rather than evidence—that the doughy security guard who thwarted the attack was in fact the man who perpetrated it.

This material—an innocent man, railroaded!—is catnip for Eastwood, which means it plays to his worst instincts. Yet while Richard Jewell is clumsy and dubious, it is also fleet and colorful, featuring some of the director’s most relaxed and immersive filmmaking in years. It would be terrible if it weren’t so enjoyable. Read More

Sully: He’s Not a Hero. Just Ask the Government.

Tom Hanks is a haunted hero in Clint Eastwood's "Sully"

In the dreadful 2012 flop Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood plays a grizzled baseball scout who has grown disgusted with the sport’s increasing reliance on analytics and technology. “Anybody who uses computers doesn’t know a damn thing about this game,” he growls at one point. His irascible critique encapsulates the film’s worldview, namely, that the classicist’s wisdom of observational experience will always vanquish the modernist’s reliance on statistical data. That broad thesis is now the animating force behind Sully, Eastwood’s brisk, hackneyed, intermittently diverting reenactment of an American tragedy that wasn’t. It’s the kind of movie where the officious villains blindly trust computer simulations, only to be taken aback when they’re informed that they’ve failed to account for that most vexing of variables: humanity.

The majority of the humanity in Sully derives from Tom Hanks, an actor who, luckily for Eastwood, could imbue a paperclip with an aura of moral and professional authority. Here he provides the necessary blunt-force gravitas as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot better known as, well, you know. The film opens with anonymous voices screaming Sully’s name as an airplane glides above the streets of Queens before crashing into a skyscraper. It’s a nightmarish image, which makes sense, given that it is born from Sully’s nightmares. In actuality, as you will no doubt remember, things went quite differently: On January 15, 2009, after U.S. Airways Flight 1549 suffered power failure in both engines due to bird strikes, Sully successfully landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board. The incident was swiftly dubbed “the Miracle on the Hudson”, with Sully as its chief architect. Roll credits. Read More

The Missing Pictures of 2014, Part II: Feat. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Marvel

Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice"; Bradley Cooper in "American Sniper"; Jack O'Connell and Ben Mendelsohn in "Starred Up"; Timothy Spall in "Mr. Turner"

The Manifesto is ranking every movie from 2014. Before getting to our top 10, we’re supplementing our rankings with the handful of films we saw over the past month. This is the second installment of The Missing Pictures; the third will arrive tomorrow. And if you missed the first, you can find it here.

49. Mr. Turner (directed by Mike Leigh, 97% Rotten Tomatoes, 94 Metacritic). At one point in Mr. Turner, the film’s title character, played with glowering disdain by Timothy Spall, inquires about the mechanics of an invention called a camera. It’s a question that befits Turner’s intellectual curiosity, but it also carries a touch of irony, given that the movie’s director has been wielding a camera for the past several decades. Mr. Turner is not Leigh’s best film, but it may be his most exquisitely pictorial, and its painterly images (courtesy of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope) might even satisfy the lofty standards of its protagonist.

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