理查德·朱维尔的哀歌

东木老爷子带着他稳健平和的叙事风格又向我们走来了！

学期末考完试去看的大银幕。

巧的是那个学期开学前和同学看的第一部电影正好也是老爷子的—《骡子》。

有种一个轮回结束的感觉。

当时姬友想看紫罗兰永恒花园，被我无情拒绝了。

其实就是想骗我姬友去看这种现实题材然后听她说话哈哈哈哈～我就知道她看完一定会有话说。

她看到的细节很多，不见得都是创作者的本意，但还挺有趣的。

大家好像都看的是无良媒体和缺德FBI对善良民众对迫害，姬友却指出朱维尔缺乏主观能动性，沉溺于自己所谓的正义感，变得盲目，听不进别人的意见，没有去想怎样高效地解决问题，只是幼稚地做着符合自己心目中英雄形象设定的事。

他偶尔听律师的话只是因为他是唯一看得起他的人，他最终爆发的动力基本来自于母亲的崩溃。

没有母亲和律师支持的他大概率是一个废人。

她说，看电影时你也许会同情他，支持他，但是如果你身边真的有这么一号人，你会把他当朋友吗？

姬友比较喜欢的还是Sam Rockwell的律师，从头到尾都在冷静思考积极行动，同时也是不畏强权的斗士。

电影试图控诉社会的现状，我看到的是一个无法自保善良的灵魂如何被人性抽打。

理查德成为英雄的前三天媒体和公众对他连吹带捧，自己也有些飘飘然，然而事情急转直下转眼间受人追捧的英雄受到媒体围攻。

FBI随背负着政府的使命，却带着严重的个人偏见处理案件，并非寻找真相而是试图验证自己的观点。

不难想象理查德如果没有律师沃森的帮助，在FBI的操纵以及媒体的推波助澜下已经锒铛入狱，理查德一定满是怨恨、懊恼，在六年后找到真相前已经成为牺牲品。

六年之后真相大白，除了对理查德来说意义非凡证明自己的清白坟前多了几束鲜花，群众已失去对事情的热情，对媒体来说也失去了时效性，没有人再关心对错。

庆幸的是，理查德活着看到了自己平冤昭雪，否则可能是另一部电影的素材——电影控诉人性之恶和美国媒体的堕落，在各大影展连拿大奖，可主人工已经沦为牺牲品，对于理查德来说，一切已经失去意义，只能留下哭瞎双眼的老母独自流泪。

单纯为一个好人，无法在社会中立足。

生活最可悲的事莫过于好人被整，小人得意，现实中笑到最后的人往往多是下三滥者，多源于好人大多没有自保的能力。

理查德仅成为一首悲歌而非悲剧，庆幸于他认识一位不好惹的律师。

当理查的需要捍卫自己的时候有人指导他如何面对他人的恶意，而非被人心怀恶意的盘问后每句话回答后还带着敬语。

沃森对着女记者一顿F语言攻击之后，她才愿意了解一下真相。

所以《绿皮车》里需要托尼当司机，《监狱风云》里需要发哥带着辉仔。

当学校急着满足于人类的虚荣心把孩子教育成天使的时候，还要让孩子明白一件事：当你想把手中的棒棒糖分享给他人时，前提是有能力保护它不被抢走，否则不用你主动分享别人也可以得到。

On July 30, 1996, the media identified Richard Jewell as the F.B.I.'s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. For the first time, the 34-year-old security guard tells his extraordinary story, to MARIE BRENNER: his brief moment as a national hero, his hounding by the Feds and the press, and his eccentric friendship with the unknown southern lawyer who helped him through his public torment.FEBRUARY 1997 MARIE BRENNERDAN WINTERSThe search warrant was short and succinct, dated August 3, 9:41 A.M. F.B.I. special agent Diader Rosario was instructed to produce "hair samples (twenty-five pulled and twenty-five combed hairs from the head)" of Richard Allensworth Jewell. That Saturday, Atlanta was humid; the temperature would rise to 85 degrees. There were 34 Olympic events scheduled, including women's team handball, but Richard Jewell was in his mother's apartment playing Defender on a computer set up in the spare bedroom. Jewell hadn't slept at all the night before, or the night before that. He could hear the noise from the throng of reporters massed on the hill outside the small apartment in the suburbs. All morning long, he had been focused on the screen, trying to score off "the little guy who goes back and forth shooting the aliens," but at 12:30 the sound of the telephone disturbed his concentration. Very few people had his new number, by necessity unlisted. Since the F.B.I. had singled him out as the Olympic Park bombing suspect three days earlier, Jewell had received approximately 1,000 calls a day—someone had posted his mother's home number on the Internet."I'll be right over," his lawyer Watson Bryant told him. "They want your hair, they want your palm prints, and they want something called a voice exemplar—the goddamn bastards." The curtains were drawn in the pastel apartment filled with his mother's crafts and samplers; A HOME WITHOUT A DOG IS JUST A HOUSE, one read. By this time Bryant had a system. He would call Jewell from his car phone so that the door could be unlatched and Bryant could avoid the questions from the phalanx of reporters on the hill.Turning into the parking lot in a white Explorer, Bryant could see sound trucks parked up and down Buford Highway. The middle-class neighborhood of apartment complexes and shopping centers was near the DeKalb Peachtree Airport, where local millionaires kept their private planes. The moment Bryant got out of his car, the reporters began to shout: "Hey, Watson, do they have the murderer?" "Are they arresting Jewell?" Bryant moved quickly toward the staircase to the Jewells' apartment. He wore a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a frayed Brooks Brothers polo shirt. He was 45 years old, with strong features and thinning hair, a southern preppy from a country-club family. Bryant had a stern demeanor lightened by a contrarian's sense of the absurd. He was often distracted—from time to time he would miss his exits on the highway—and he had the regional tendency of defining himself by explaining what he was not. "I am not a Democrat, because they want your money. I am not a Republican, because they take your rights away," he told me soon after I met him. Bryant can talk your ear off about the Bill of Rights, ending with a flourish: "I think everyone ought to have the right to be stupid. I am a Libertarian."At the time Richard Jewell was named as a suspect by the F.B.I., Watson Bryant made a modest living by doing real-estate closings in the suburbs, but Jewell and his lawyer had formed an unusual friendship a decade earlier, when Jewell worked as a mailroom clerk at a federal disaster-relief agency where Bryant practiced law. Jewell was then a stocky kid without a father, who had trained as an auto mechanic but dreamed of being a policeman; Bryant had always had a soft spot for oddballs and strays, a personality quirk which annoyed his then wife no end.The serendipity of this friendship, an alliance particularly southern in its eccentricity, would bring Watson Bryant to the immense task of attempting to save Richard Jewell from the murky quagmire of a national terrorism case. The simple fact was that Bryant had no qualifications for the job. He had no legal staff except for his assistant, Nadya Light, no contacts in the press, and no history in Washington. He was the opposite of media-savvy; he rarely read the papers and never watched the nightly news, preferring the Discovery Channel's shows on dog psychology. Now that Richard Jewell was his client, he had entered a zone of worldwide media hysteria fraught with potential peril. Jewell suspected that his pickup truck had been flown in a C-130 transport plane to the F.B.I. unit at Quantico in Virginia, and Bryant worried that his friend would be arrested any minute. Worse, Bryant knew that he had nothing going for him, no levers anywhere. His only asset was his personality; he had the bravado and profane hyperbole of a southern rich boy, but he was in way over his head.For hours that Saturday, Bryant and Jewell sat and waited for the F.B.I. From time to time Jewell would put binoculars under the drawn curtain in his mother's bedroom to peer at the reporters on the hill. Bryant was nervous that Jewell's mother, Bobi, would return from baby-sitting and see her son having hairs pulled out of his head. Bryant stalked around the apartment complaining about the F.B.I. "The sons of bitches did not show up until three P.M.," he later recalled, and when they did, there were five of them. The F.B.I. medic was tall and muscular and wore rubber gloves. He asked Jewell to sit at a small round table in the living room, where his mother puts her holiday-theme displays. Bryant stood by the sofa next to a portrait of Jewell in his Habersham County deputy's uniform. He watched the F.B.I. procedure carefully. The medic, who had huge hands, used tiny drugstore tweezers. "He eyeballed his scalp and took his hair in sections. First he ran a comb through it, and then he took these hairs and plucked them out one by one."Jewell "went stone-cold," but Bryant could not contain his temper. "I am his lawyer. I know you can have this, I know you have a search warrant, but I tell you this: If you were doing this to me, you would have to fight me. You would have to beat the shit out of me," Bryant recalled telling the case agent Ed Bazar. Bazar, Bryant later said, was apologetic. "He seemed almost embarrassed to be there." As he counted out the hairs, he placed them in an envelope. The irony of the situation was not lost on Bryant. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court, but he had a disdain for authority, and he was representing a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time.It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell's thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. "That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table," Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes." That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client's going to jail. "I said, 'I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can't, but you are not doing this today.'"All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, "they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair. ... I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two." He felt "violated and humiliated," he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant's outburst. He thought of the bombing victims— Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. "I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair."I met Richard Jewell three months later, on October 28, a few hours before a press conference called by his lawyers to allow Jewell to speak publicly for the first time since the F.B.I. had cleared him. Jewell's lawyers also intended to announce that they would file damage suits against NBC and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was a Monday, and that weekend the local U.S. attorney had delivered a letter to one of the lawyers stating Jewell was no longer a suspect. "Goddamn it," Bryant had told me on the phone, "the sons of bitches did not even have the decency to address it to Richard Jewell."I had been instructed to come early to the offices of Wood & Grant, the flashy plaintiff lawyers Bryant had pulled in to help him with Jewell's civil suits. When I arrived, I was alone in the office with Sharon Anderson, the redheaded assistant answering the phones. "Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant . . . Wood & Grant"—the calls overwhelmed her. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were rushing from CNN to the local NBC and ABC affiliates, working the shows. "Everyone has theories of who the real bomber is," Sharon said. "I just write it all down and give it to the boys."When Lin Wood arrived, he was still in full makeup. Movie-star handsome with green eyes and styled hair, Wood has the heated oratory of a trial lawyer. "It's a war! Why in this bevy of stories does not anyone point out the fact that Richard was a hero one day and a demon the next? They have destroyed this man's life!"Watson Bryant had worked with Wood and Grant years before in a local law firm. He admired Wayne Grant for his methodical sense of detail; Grant, a New Yorker, had once forced the city of Atlanta to pay large damages to a man injured while illegally digging for antique bottles in a park. But Lin Wood's suppressed rage was a marvel to Bryant. "He is so tough he could make people cry in depositions when we were kids," Bryant told me. Wood possessed the smooth style of a member of the Atlanta establishment, but he had a hardscrabble past. He was a boy from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Macon who at age 17 discovered his mother's body after his father had murdered her. His father went to jail, and Wood wound up as a lawyer. He went through college and law school on scholarships and with part-time jobs. I could hear Wood on Sharon's telephone: "He's more than innocent. He's a goddamn hero. . . . Everyone is going to pay who wronged Richard Jewell. Besides NBC and The A.J.C., we are going to look into suing CNN and Jay Leno."Through the large picture window, I had a clear view of the remains of the Centennial Olympic Park, where the bomb had exploded on the night of July 26. Where the sound-and-light tower had once been, there was now a flattened dirt field. It was possible to see the Greek commemorative sculpture that Richard Jewell used to describe for tourists at the AT&T pavilion, where he worked as a security guard.Suddenly, Jewell was in the room. "Hi. I'm Richard. I'm a little late. I don't want you to think I am rude. I am not like that." He had an open face, a bland pleasantness, an eagerness to please. "Can I get you a Coke?" he asked me. "How about some coffee?" Jewell wore a blue-and-white striped shirt and chinos. He occupied physical space like a teenager; he sprawled, he lumbered, he pawed through Sharon's candy bowl. On TV his face had a porcine blankness; he appeared suspicious. In person, Jewell has a hard time disguising his emotions.We were alone in the conference room; I noticed that Jewell avoided looking out the window toward the park. He shifted his glance nervously away from the view. He often awakens in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, thinking of the events in the park in the early morning hours of July 27. "It took me days before I could even come in here," he said anxiously.The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first.When Jewell noticed a local ABC reporter outside near Sharon's desk, his face darkened. "I don't want to be around reporters right now. I guess I am a little nervous. What is he doing here?" The atmosphere was now filled with tension; the reporter was escorted out.Moments later, we gathered in the hallway. Wood was steely: "We are going in two cars. Richard, you drive with me. Your mother will go with Wayne. As we walk down the hall right now, if the ABC people are outside, I will tap you on the shoulder and I will say, 'How are you doing?' You will say, 'Fine.' Is that understood?" "O.K., Lin. I understand," Jewell said quietly, head bowed.As Jewell walked down the hall, an ABC cameraman photographed him looking grim. Seconds after the elevator doors closed, Jewell exploded: "What are they doing here, Lin? Did you invite them? They are animals. Why didn't you get them out of here?""ABC has been good to you. How do I get them out of the office on the day of your press conference?""That is what security is for!" Jewell said, quivering with rage. "Where is Watson?" he asked in the garage. "I told you: he's at a real-estate closing. He will meet you at the press conference," Wood said. Jewell moved to his mother's side, as solicitous as a child. "Are you all right, Mother?" he asked. "It is all I am going to be able to do not to do something!" she said angrily.When we arrived at the Marriott hotel on 1-75, there was another discussion in the parking lot, about who would walk with whom in front of the cameras. Jewell turned to his close friend Dave Dutchess: "Are you all right, man?" Dutchess, a truckdriver who worked with Jewell years ago, has long hair and a tattoo of a panther on his forearm. "Richard and I are like brothers," he told me. "I would die for him." As the cameras closed in on them, the group fled to a private room in the Marriott. The auditorium was filled with reporters. "Showtime! Showtime!" the cameramen yelled when Jewell, his mother, and all the lawyers took the stage."I hope and pray that no one else is ever subjected to the pain and the ordeal that I have gone through," Jewell said, his voice breaking. "The authorities should keep in mind the rights of the citizens. I thank God it is ended and that you now know what I have known all along: I am an innocent man."After the press conference, Bobi and Richard Jewell remained in a private room. The bookers from Good Morning America and the Today show pressed Jewell to step before their cameras, and when Watson Bryant told them no, Monica, the G.M.A. booker, began to cry, "I'll lose my job." Then Yael, the Today-show booker, cornered Nadya Light: "Is Richard doing something with G.M.A.?'Upstairs, Jewell and his mother were being filmed by a CBS camera crew for a 60 Minutes news update. "Well, Bobi, did you get your Tupperware back?" Mike Wallace asked by phone from New York. "Richard, you need to lose some more weight." Despite Wallace's festive spirit, the atmosphere was curiously flat. Bryant urged Jewell to talk to a USA Today reporter. Jewell balked: "They can all go suck wind."In the car on the way back to Wood & Grant, Bobi was angry. All of her possessions had come back from the F.B.I. marked up with ink. "Every piece of Tupperware I own is ruined, thank you very much. They wrote numbers all over it, and I have tried everything to clean it—Comet and Brillo—but nothing works."Back at the office, she sat on the sofa and listened as Bryant negotiated with Yael for a flight to New York— Delta, first-class, 9:30 P.M. Jewell was scheduled to appear on three shows in New York, visit the American Museum of Natural History, and then fly to Washington, D.C., for Larry King Live. "I would like to go home, put on my outfit, and walk in the woods," Bobi said. "Richard, we are leaving.""Yes, ma'am," Richard said.One hour later, a telephone call came in to the offices of Wood & Grant. The lawyers had the call on speaker, and it blared through the room. "Goddamn it, Lin. When will this be over?" In the background, you could hear Bobi sobbing. "What in the world?" Wood asked. Jewell explained that a sound truck from ABC had been waiting in the parking lot when the Jewells got home. There had been words and threats, and Dave Dutchess had taken his stun gun off his motorcycle and waved it at the ABC van. The cameraman yelled: Stop harassing us! Dave yelled back: You are harassing us! Now get your ass out of here!Wood shouted into the speakerphone: "Do not meddle! You cannot jeopardize where you have gotten to and what you want to do! All you have to do is put up with this for one more day and the damn thing is over. Bobi, there is nothing you can do about it; you have to stay cool." Bobi cried back, "They are going to destroy me!"The moment they hung up, Wood turned to Bryant. "New York is canceled. No Katie Couric. No Good Morning America. They are losing it. You better call Yael." "No," Bryant said, "they have lost it. All of the above: their patience, their temper and heart."That evening a very testy Katie Couric tracked Bryant down at Nadya Light's apartment, where we had gone to watch the news. "I want you to know that I canceled interviewing Barbra Streisand in L.A. for Richard Jewell. Don't think he is always going to be a news story. No one will care about him in three days," she said, according to Bryant. "Look, Katie, I am sorry. But Richard is in no condition to talk to the press. He is worn out," Bryant told her.Later, Jewell would tell me that that day, which should have been one of his most satisfying, was actually his worst. His notoriety had tainted the triumph; everything positive had become negative. "I was in despair," he said. As he had for most of the previous 88 days, he spent the night confined in the Buford Highway apartment, a prisoner of his circumstances, with his mother, Dave Dutchess, and Dave's fiancee, Beatty, eating Domino's Pizza and watching himself lead the newscasts on NBC, CBS, and ABC."This case has everything—the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights from the First to the Sixth Amendment." 'This case has everything— the F.B.I., the press, the violation of the Bill of Rights, from the First to the Sixth Amendment," Watson Bryant told me in one of our first conversations. It has become common to characterize the F.B.I.'s investigation of Richard Jewell as the epitome of false accusation. The phrase "the Jewell syndrome," a rush to judgment, has entered the language of newsrooms and First Amendment forums. On the night of Jewell's press conference, a commentator on CNN's Crossfire compared Jewell's situation to "Kafka in Prague." The case became an investigative catastrophe, which laid bare long-simmering resentments of many F.B.I. career professionals regarding the micromanagement style and imperious attitude of Louis Freeh and his inner circle of former New York prosecutors, who have worked together since their days at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District. Within the bureau, the beleaguered director now has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children. Like Freeh, those near him have also acquired a nickname: Louie's yes-men. Two of Freeh's closest associates, F.B.I. general counsel Howard Shapiro and former deputy director Larry Potts, have been severely criticized, respectively, for advising the White House of confidential F.B.I. material and for an alleged cover-up of the mishandling of the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, where F.B.I. agents killed the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a white supremacist.In November and December, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Jewell affair. Responding to an attempt by headquarters and certain officials to distance themselves, according to F.B.I. sources, several agents, including a senior F.B.I. supervisor in Atlanta, have provided the O.P.R. with signed statements insisting that Freeh himself was responsible for "oversight" during the crisis. These agents "shocked the investigators" because they reiterated, when asked who was in charge of the overall command of the investigation, that it was the director himself.What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh's future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the F.B.I. have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh's chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s, it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor's table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam's answer was immediate: the F.B.I. has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain.Richard Jewell had a reverence for authority that blinded him to the paradox of his situation. He idealized the investigative skills of the F.B.I. and could not understand that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy. Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter has invited Jewell to Washington to testify at congressional hearings on the F.B.I.'s conduct in the Atlanta bombing. Ironically, the bungling of the investigation might lead to the reshuffling of personalities at the top of the bureau and threaten Freeh's reputation. In October, according to The Washington Post, Freeh sent an unusual memo to all 25,000 F.B.I. personnel: He would not be abandoning his post amid reports of problems with the Jewell case and Filegate, and of a growing dissatisfaction inside the bureau. "I am proud to be the F.B.I. director," Freeh wrote.From the beginning, Jewell was perceived in the public imagination as a hapless dummy, a plodding misfit, a Forrest Gump. On one of the first days he worked as a security guard at the AT&T pavilion, he noticed that his co-workers were covering the steps inside the sound tower with graffiti. On one step Jewell scrawled with a flourish two bromides: IF YOU DIDN'T GO PAST ME, YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE and LIFE IS TOUGH. TOUGHER WHEN YOU ARE STUPID. Soon after he was targeted as a suspect in the Olympics bombing, the F.B.I. confiscated the step. Analysts appeared to believe that the graffiti contained a clue to his character. "They told the lawyers the statement was an obvious taunt," Jewell said. In fact, the second line was an expression he had cribbed from one of his favorite actors, John Wayne.Within the F.B.I., the beleaguered director has a new nickname: J. Edgar Hoover with children."To understand Richard Jewell, you have to be aware that he is a cop. He talks like a cop and thinks like a cop," his criminal lawyer, Jack Martin, told me. The tone of Jewell's voice drops noticeably when he says the word "officer," and his conversation is filled with observations about traffic patterns, security devices, and car wrecks. Even the vocabulary he uses to describe the 88 days he was a suspect is out of the lexicon of police work, and he continues to talk about his situation then in the present tense: "This is an out-and-out ambush, and I am a hostage."Jewell has a need to accommodate. He can be startlingly opaque. On the afternoon of July 30, Jewell answered the door of his mother's apartment to Don Johnson and Diader Rosario from the F.B.I. "We need your help making a training film," they told him. "I never questioned it," he told me. The next day Rosario appeared again with a search warrant. "The weird thing was that when they were searching my apartment I was, like, 'Take everything. Take the carpet. I am law enforcement. I am just like you. Guys, take whatever you are going to take, because it is going to prove that I didn't do anything.' And a couple of them were looking at me like I was crazy."Leaving the apartment on one occasion, he told the agents, "I am wearing a bright shirt so y'all can see me easier." He recalled feeling anger when he read descriptions of himself as a child-man, a mama's boy, and "a wannabe policeman," but he said, "If I was in the place of everybody else and I saw a 34-year-old guy living with his mother, I would have reservations about that, too. I would think, Why is he doing that?"The December issue of Atlanta magazine reported that there was no record of a Jewell family in Danville, Virginia, where Richard Jewell was born. Atlanta referred to an article in the Danville Register & Bee which asked, "Did Richard Jewell ever sleep here?" "This is a part of my life Richard and I do not like to speak about," Bobi Jewell told me one night at dinner. Richard was born in Danville, but his name was Richard White; his father was Bobi's first husband, Robert Earl White, who worked for Chevrolet. According to Bobi, Richard's father, who died recently, was "irresponsible and a ladies' man." When Richard was four, the marriage broke up. Bobi found work as an insurance-agency claims coordinator and soon met John Jewell, an executive in the same business. Shortly after John Jewell married Bobi, he adopted Richard.From the time Richard was a child, he and his mother were a unit. Bobi, a woman of intelligence and disciplined work habits, is both tender and tough on the subject of her son. She still calls Richard "my boy," but she has a peppery disposition. Richard was brought up in a strict Baptist home. "If I didn't say 'Yes, ma'am' or 'No, ma'am' and get it out quick enough, I would be on the ground," he said. When he was six, the family moved to Atlanta. Richard was the boy who helped the teachers and worked as a school crossing guard, but he had few friends in high school. "I was a wannabe athlete, but I wasn't good enough," he said. He ran the movie projector in the library. A military-history buff, he liked to talk about Napoleon and the Vietnam War and read books on both World Wars.Jewell's ambition was to work on cars, so he enrolled in a technical school in southern Georgia. On his third day there, Bobi discovered that her husband had packed a suitcase. "He left a note saying that he was a failure and no good for us," Jewell said. Almost immediately, Richard moved back home and took a job repairing cars. "My mom and I tried to take care of each other," he said. "I think I handled it pretty much better than she did." Richard took the brunt of his father's abandonment; Bobi pulled even closer to her son. "She hated all men for about three years after that, and she became overly protective of me. She looked at it that I was going to do the same thing that my dad did. I was 18 or 19. I was working. She never liked my dates, but I never held that against her. We have always been able to lean on each other."Richard managed a local TCBY yogurt shop and once stopped a burglary in progress. At the age of 22, he was hired as a clerk at the Small Business Administration, and he impressed Watson Bryant and the other lawyers in the office with his personable nature. They called him Radar because of his efficiency. "You could say, 'I'm hungry,' and suddenly this kid would be by your side with a Snickers bar," Bryant recalled. When Jewell's contract with the S.B.A. ran out, he moved on to be a Marriott house detective. In 1990 he was hired as a jailer in the Habersham County Sheriff's Office, and in 1991 he became a deputy. As part of his training, he was sent to the Northeast Georgia Police Academy, where he finished in the upper 25 percent of his class. He finally had an identity; he was a law-enforcement officer.Jewell was unlucky in love. He presented one woman with an engagement ring, and later, in Habersham County, he would give another a large wooden key with a sign that read, THIS IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK YOUR HEART, but both relationships came apart. In northern Georgia, Jewell worked nights and became wedded to his job. By his own description, he was methodical. "I am the kind of person who plans everything. I like to go from A to B to C to D. This going from A to D and arguing over everything—I say no." Habersham County, a scenic part of the piney woods in Georgia's Bible Belt, was for Jewell like "leaving the 1990s and going into the 1970s in terms of law enforcement." Many rich Atlantans have country houses in the mountains, but the small towns of Demorest and Charlottesville are relatively undeveloped, reminding one of Jewell's lawyers of the scenery in the movie Deliverance. "If you get lost up there, you might find a guy with a bow and arrow," the lawyer said.Recently, Jewell and I took the 90-minute drive from Atlanta to Habersham County, which has acres of apple orchards. The leaves were turning, and the roads were mostly deserted. In the towns, however, were stores, apple stands, and even a good Chinese restaurant. As Jewell's blue pickup truck turned into the parking lot of a shopping center, several people came out to greet him.Jewell had lived in a small yellow house up a steep rocky driveway. On the day we visited, the current resident's Halloween decorations were still up, as were faded white satin ribbons hanging from many trees, remnants of a campaign to clear Richard Jewell organized by area friends. Jewell had lived 50 yards from the Chattahoochee River near a kayak-and-canoe tourist concession on a main road—not in a "cabin in the woods," as several reports stated after the bombing. He worked the night shift, and when he would arrive home at dawn, he told me, he could look up and "see a sky filled with stars."He was not a loner; he made friends with several local families. He would often leave a box of Dunkin' Donuts on friends' porches at four A.M. During the O. J. Simpson trial, he and the other deputies would meet in the turnaround on Highway 985 in the middle of the night and review the day's events and the bungling by the Los Angeles Police Department. Jewell would later be annoyed that the F.B.I. confiscated his copy of former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's account of the trial. Jewell dated a local girl, Sheree Chastain, and had a close relationship with her family.Jewell had a complex history working at the Habersham County Sheriff's Office. When he was still a jailer, he arrested a couple making too much noise in a hot tub at an apartment building where he did part-time security work. He was arrested for impersonating an officer and, after pleading guilty to a lesser charge, was placed on probation on the condition that he seek psychological counseling.By his own estimation, Jewell's strength as a cop was "working car wrecks." He had his mother's diligence; he worked 14 hours a day and organized a safety fair. Later in 1995 he wrecked his patrol car and was demoted to working in the jail. Rick Moore, a local deputy, advised him to accept the job, but Jewell despised the jailhouse atmosphere. He told me, "It was a small room filled with cigarette smoke. I couldn't take it." He resigned, and in a short time he moved to a police job at Piedmont College, a liberal-arts school with approximately 1,000 students on the main road in Demorest. The college police had jurisdiction only on campus and in an area extending out 500 feet. Jewell chased cars speeding down the highway and had arguments over turf with other officers. He was instrumental in several arrests, including that of a suspected burglar he discovered hiding at the top of a tree. For his work on a volunteer rescue squad, he was named a citizen of the year.According to Brad Mattear, a former resident director, Piedmont was a school of "P.K.'s"—preachers' kids. It was 80 percent Baptist with a strict no-drinking rule. The college had many rebellious students, according to Mattear, kids who were "away from home for the first time and wanted to party and drink." Mattear knew Jewell well and recalled his good manners and playful nature. "It was always 'Yes, sir' and 'Yes, ma'am.'" Jewell would tell students, "I know y'all are going to drink. Don't do it on campus."Jewell felt confined by his boundaries and could be heavy-handed when it came to writing out reports on minor infractions. Once when we were driving by the campus, he pointed to a small brick dormitory. "That was where all the partying would go on," he told me. Jewell would raid dorm rooms and report drinking violations. "I did not hesitate to tell the parents—in no uncertain terms—what their kids were up to," he said.He soon made enemies at the school. "Three or four times a week," Mattear said, Piedmont students were in the office of Ray Cleere, the president of the college, complaining about Jewell and other Piedmont police. After Jewell was admonished for a number of controversial arrests, he resigned.Jewell had an out: his mother was going to have an operation on her foot. He would go home to Atlanta for the Olympics and look for a new job. He called his mother: "Is it all right with you if I stay with you while you have your surgery?" He hoped he might get a job with the Atlanta police or, failing that, work security at the Olympics. "I thought, Working at the Centennial Olympic Park will look really good on my resume."At the age of 33, back in his mother's apartment, he was at first treated like a wayward teenager. Bobi was sharp with him about his slovenly habits, his weight, and his driving. Bobi had carved out a life for herself; she arrived at work by eight A.M. each morning and had many friends. Trim, with short-cropped hair, Bobi Jewell is the kind of woman who labels her clothes and spices and spends much of her spare time baking cakes and babysitting for extra money. She carries on telephone friendships with claim adjusters at other companies. It was somewhat unsettling for her, she told me, to have Richard at home after she had grown used to living with only her dog, Brandi, and her cat, Boots. Bobi was annoyed that he had wrecked a patrol car, and worried about his safety. "Every time he leaves the apartment, I'll say, 'Richard . . . ' And he'll say, 'Yes, ma'am. I know. The person that I am going to see will be there when I get there,'" she said. On one occasion Bobi talked about Richard's return to Atlanta. "What is wrong with trying to revamp your life?" she asked me. Her eyes filled with tears. "Why does everyone in the media think it is so strange?"On Friday, July 26, Bobi Jewell was home waiting for her niece to arrive from Virginia for the Olympic softball competition the following week. In preparation, she had stocked her apartment with food. It was a clear Georgia evening, not as hot as had been expected. As usual, Richard left for the park at 4:45 P.M. and arrived at the AT&T pavilion about 5:30. His stomach was bothering him; he was convinced that he had eaten a bad hamburger the day before. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant had arranged to take their children to Centennial Park that night. The park, in downtown Atlanta, stretches over 21 acres. There were air-conditioned tents, concerts on the stage, and hot-dog and souvenir stands. Downtown Atlanta was usually deserted in the oppressively hot, humid summer, but this year thousands of tourists filled the sidewalks, or sat on benches in the shade of some crape-myrtle trees, or cooled off by a fountain. Tour buses clogged the main arteries, and everyone complained that it took hours to get anywhere; stories were traded about athletes' getting to their competitions late because of the poor planning of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.As always, Jewell was working the 12-hour night shift near the sound-and-light tower by the stage. He was pleased because one of his favorite groups—Jack Mack and the Heart Attack—was going to perform at 12:45. Jewell had a routine: he would check in and fill the ice chest he kept by a bench at his station. Jewell liked to offer water and Cokes to pregnant women or policemen who stopped to rest.After he arrived at the park, his stomach cramps grew worse and he had a bout of diarrhea. At approximately 10 P.M. he took a break to go to the bathroom. The closest one was by the stage, but the security staff was not allowed to use it. "I really have to go," Jewell says he told the stage manager. "And he said, 'Well, O.K. this time.'"When Jewell came out, he noticed that it was "real calm" and there wasn't much wind blowing. At that time of night, the crowd from Bud World became a little more raucous. Jewell was annoyed when he saw a group of drunks near his bench and beer cans littering the area beside the fence nearby. As he went to report the trash and the group that was carousing, he spotted a large olive-green military-style backpack, known as an Alice pack, under the bench. There had been a similar bag found the week before. Jewell later told an F.B.I. agent that he was annoyed that one of the drunks had tried to get into the lens of a camera crew. Jewell had told them to cut it out. "They were running off at the mouth," Jewell would later tell Larry Landers of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (G.B.I.)."I was light about the package at first," he told me, "kidding around with Tom Davis from the G.B.I.: 'Well, are you going to open it?' At that point, it was not a concern. I was thinking to myself, Well, I am sure one of these people left it on the ground. When Davis came back and said, 'Nobody said it was theirs,' that is when the little hairs on the back of my head began to stand up. I thought, Uh-oh. This is not good."I never really had time to be frightened. My law-enforcement background paid off here. What went through my head was like a computer screen of this list I had to do. I had to call my supervisor. I have to tell people in the tower that something was going on. I have to be firm with them, stay calm, and be professional."Almost immediately, Jewell and Tom Davis cleared a 25-foot-square area around the backpack; Jewell made two trips into the tower to warn the technicians. "I want y'all out now. This is serious."Two blocks away on Marietta Street, approximately 300 editors, copywriters, and reporters from Cox newspapers around the country had taken over the extra desks in the new eighth-floor newsroom at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to prepare the special Olympics edition they put out each afternoon. The paper had gone "Olympics-crazy," according to one reporter. The editor, Ron Martin, and the managing editor, John Walter—"WalMart," as they were called—had let it be known that no expense would be spared. Ann Hardie, who normally covers science, had been sent around the world to master the fine points of beach volleyball; Bill Rankin, officially on the federal-court beat, was assigned table tennis. The paper intended to set new standards in its hometown during the games, but in addition there was a hint of redemption in the air.Since Cox newspaper executives had forced the resignation of the distinguished editor Bill Kovach in 1988, the paper had suffered a severe loss of reputation. "We all felt just kind of beaten down," one reporter said. Kovach had been brought to Atlanta from The New York Times to elevate The A.J.C. into being the definitive paper of the New South, but eventually he irritated the local powers. Atlanta was inbred, a city of deals, and he resigned in a blaze of press outrage. Kovach now ran the Nieman journalism-fellowship program at Harvard, and the movie rights to his turbulent years in Atlanta—reported in these pages by Peter J. Boyer—had been sold to Warner Bros.Within the profession, The A.J.C. had become something of a joke. More and more, its emphasis was on what John Walter called "chunklets"—short bits in a soft-news style known as eye-candy. The paper published features on couples massage and how mushrooms grow in the rain. Walter had fired off several terse memos to ensure that there would be no more jumps of news stories to back pages and no more unsourced news stories, except on rare occasions. "I don't see any reason why you can't report hard news in a short form," one editor told me.The A.J. C. style of reporting in declarative sentences had a name, too: the voice of God. It was omniscient, because it allowed no references to unattributed sources. Subjects such as AIDS, which often required confidentiality, could not be covered properly in the paper, in the opinion of several reporters. The A.J.C. picked up news stories with unnamed sources from The New York Times, however, and reporters groused about the hypocrisy of the double standard.On Saturday morning, July 27, Bob Johnson, the night metro editor, left the newsroom at one A.M. The sidewalks were still crowded; Johnson sat on a wall outside waiting for an A.J.C. shuttle bus to pick him up. About 1:25 he heard a strange noise. "It sounded like an aerial bomb at a fireworks show," he said. He recalled thinking, Damn, that is sort of foolish. Then he heard screams and saw people running. Johnson rushed back upstairs to the almost deserted sixth-floor newsroom. Lyda Longa, a night police reporter, was still there. Johnson sent her down to the park and turned on the news, but nothing had moved across the wires. Just after two A.M., Longa called from the park. She told Johnson that one person had been killed and dozens were down—it was absolute chaos. Johnson could hear the sirens and the screams through the telephone; he began to type into his computer. "We were trying to get a bullet into the street edition," Johnson recalled. In the crisis, it took only minutes for reporters to return to the newsroom; several had been at the park when the bomb went off. Rochelle Bozman, an Olympics editor, appeared and took over for Johnson. Soon John Walter was there, as was Bert Roughton, who would assist him in supervising the A.J.C. coverage of the bombing.At the park, Jewell spoke with the first F.B.I. agents to arrive on the scene. The smell and the noise, he remembered, were overwhelming, and sensations blurred together. "It was hard to describe the sound," he said. "It was like what you hear in the movies. It was, like, KABOOM. I had seen an explosion in police training. We had ear protection when it went off. It smelled like a flash-bang grenade. The sky was not filled with black smoke, but grayish-white. All the shrapnel that was inside the package kept flying around, and some of the people got hit from the bench and some with metal."Bobi Jewell had just gone to sleep when the telephone rang. It was Richard. "Mom, they had a bomb go off down here, but I am O.K. regardless of what the TV says." He could hardly speak; he seemed paralyzed. Jewell did not mention to his mother that he had found the backpack and alerted Tom Davis. Bobi was perplexed. "I thought, What does he mean?"All night long she stayed on the foldout sofa watching the news reports. She was frightened by the ambulances, the noise, the bodies in the park.Soon veteran homicide detectives in the Atlanta police arrived at the bomb site. One sergeant was trying to make his way through the crowd when an Olympics official stopped him. "Tell these cops to get the hell out of here," he said, according to a captain in the homicide division. "Well, you get the fuck out of here. Who are you?" the sergeant demanded. Agents from the Atlanta F.B.I. office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were in a shouting match over jurisdiction. "We are handling this!" one said. "No, this is ours!" an F.B.I. agent snapped.In the command center at F.B.I. headquarters in northeastern Atlanta, there was complete pandemonium. The Olympics were a national convention for law enforcement. Some 30,000 security personnel were on hand. Over the next few days, there would be an internal debate: Who was going to be in charge of the bombing investigation? In Atlanta at that time were three veteran investigators with executive experience: Tom Fuentes, who is credited with helping to bring John Gotti to heel; Barry Mawn, who has worked extensively in organized-crime probes; and Robin Montgomery, the head of the critical-incident unit at Quantico, who at Ruby Ridge in 1992 questioned the disastrous "rules of engagement" which led to tragedy.In the early-morning hours, F.B.I. agents picked up several suspects, including one referred to as "the drunk in the bar." According to F.B.I. sources, Louis Freeh himself got on the telephone to Barry Mawn. Freeh, a former F.B.I. agent, was personally monitoring the initial investigation by means of a series of conference calls from the command post at F.B.I. headquarters. He focused on "the drunk in the bar," who had been making threats the night before, and within hours the information was leaked that the F.B.I. had a suspect. From Atlanta, Barry Mawn contacted his superiors in Washington. "This suspect is not the bomber," he reportedly said, according to a former highlevel F.B.I. executive. Freeh allegedly lost his temper and belittled Mawn's professional abilities. He is said to have told Mawn that he "had handled this all wrong." The words one hears characterizing Freeh's telephone calls to the agents on duty in Atlanta are "abusive," "condescending," and "dismissive." A story went around the command center that Freeh was already saying, "We have our man," according to a source in the bureau.Watson Bryant was thinking, I cannot believe that I know anyone who throws pipe bombs into gopher holes.Freeh made a decision: however experienced Montgomery, Fuentes, and Mawn were, this investigation would be run by Division 5 of the F.B.I., the National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal case—their strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court. The F.B.I. promptly declared the bombing a terrorism case and placed it under the authority of Bob Bryant, head of the division. David Tubbs of Division 5 was sent to Atlanta to be the spokesman and to augment Woody Johnson, the Atlanta special agent in charge (S.A.C.), who had been trained in hostage rescue and who was awkward in press briefings. Tubbs was not as experienced in criminal cases as Mawn or Montgomery, who returned to Newark and Quantico, respectively, "to get out of the line of fire," according to numerous F.B.I. sources. But Bryant and Freeh were reportedly micromanaging the S.A.C.'s and, later, the case agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario. 106107 VIEW ARTICLE PAGESOn the morning of the bombing, Watson Bryant's alarm went off at six A.M. He was going to the Olympic kayak competition on the Ocoee River with Andy Currie, a friend from his Vanderbilt University days. He learned of the bombing on the radio as he was getting ready to go to Currie's house. "Whoever has done this should be skinned alive," he told Currie. He spent the day in the country, and on Sunday he went out to run errands. When he got home, there was a message on his answering machine: "Watson, this is Richard Jewell. You may have heard that I found the bomb and people are calling me a hero. Somebody told me I might get a book contract." It had been years since Bryant had spoken to Jewell, but he did not immediately return the call; he was busy finishing up some contracts so that he could take a few days off to enjoy the Olympics.In addition, Bryant was annoyed with Jewell. After Bryant had befriended him in their days at the Small Business Administration, Jewell had borrowed his new, $250 radar detector and never returned it. He had promised to pay him $100 for it, but he never had. In the meantime, Bryant's life had changed; he had set up an office as a solo practitioner. Bryant despised corporate politics and had no gift for them. His penchant for taking on pro-bono work for friends annoyed his wife, however. Bryant believed that Richard Jewell had attached himself to him years earlier because he lacked a father, but nevertheless Jewell could get on his nerves. By the summer of 1996, Bryant was preoccupied; his marriage had come apart two years earlier, and he was trying to sort out his life.When he finally returned Jewell's phone call, he said, "Well, damn it, where's my $100?" Jewell laughed uneasily and told him about discovering the green backpack that contained the bomb. "Didn't you see me on the news?" Bryant reminded him that he rarely watched TV. "I am proud of you, Richard," he said. "About this book contract, I think it's far-fetched, but don't sign anything unless I see it first."In the Newsweek cover story detailing the bombing, published Monday, July 29, there was no mention of Richard Jewell. It said only that "a security guard" had alerted Tom Davis of the G.B.I. that no one had claimed the backpack under his bench. By the time Newsweek was on the stands, however, Jewell had been interviewed on CNN. The AT&T publicity department had booked him on TV and told him to wear the shirt with the AT&T logo. Jewell reluctantly agreed. "The idea of going on TV made me nervous," he told me. "I was not the hero. There were so many others who saved lives."In Demorest, Ray Cleere, the president of Piedmont College, was home on Saturday, July 27, watching CNN. Cleere had at one time been Mississippi's commissioner of higher education, but he was now posted at the rural Baptist mountain school. He was said to feel that he had suffered a loss of status in the boondocks, where he was out of the academic mainstream. He called Dick Martin, his chief of campus police. Shouldn't they call the F.B.I. and tell them about Richard Jewell? he asked. Cleere had had a strong disagreement with Jewell when one of the students was caught smoking pot. Jewell wanted to arrest him; Cleere said no. Cleere, Brad Mattear recalled, "worried constantly about the image of the college." According to Mattear, "Cleere loved the limelight. He wanted public attention"—the very trait he reportedly ascribed to Richard Jewell.Dick Martin, who was fond of Jewell, suggested a compromise, according to Lin Wood: he would call a friend in the G.B.I. Cleere then called the F.B.I. hot line in Washington himself. Wood says Cleere later complained that no one had seemed to want to listen to what he had to say about Richard Jewell. But his telephone call would trigger a complex set of circumstances in Habersham County, where F.B.I. investigators fanned out over the hills, attempting to uncover evidence that could lead to Jewell's arrest. "The F.B.I. took his word, and what it actually did was get them both in a bunch of trouble," Mattear said. (Cleere has declined to comment.)For Richard Jewell, Tuesday, July 30, would become a haze in which his life was turned upside down. "The hours of the day ran so fast it is hard to remember what all happened," he told me. He started the day early at the Atlanta studio of the Today show. He was tired; the evening before he had had his friend Tim Attaway, a G.B.I. agent, for dinner. He had made lasagna and had drawn Attaway a diagram of the sound-and-light tower. Jewell had talked into the night about the bombing; only later would he learn that Attaway was wearing a wire.Despite the late evening, Jewell was excited at the thought of meeting Katie Couric and being interviewed about finding the Alice pack in the park. His mother asked him to try to get Tom Brokaw's autograph. "He was a man my mom respected a great deal," he said.When he got back to the apartment, he was surprised to see a cluster of reporters in the parking lot. "Do you think you are a suspect?" one asked. Jewell laughed. "I know they'll investigate anyone who was at the park that night," he said. "That includes you-all too." Jewell did not turn on the TV, but he noticed that the group outside the door continued to grow. At four that afternoon, Jewell received a phone call from Anthony Davis, the head of the security company Jewell worked for at AT&T. "Have you seen the news?" Davis asked. "They are saying you are a suspect." Jewell said, "They are talking to everybody." According to Jewell, Davis said, "They are zeroing in on you. To keep the publicity down, don't go to work."Within minutes, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario knocked on Jewell's door. They exuded sincerity, Jewell recalled. "They told me they wanted me to come with them to headquarters to help them make a training film to be used at Quantico," he said. Johnson played to Jewell's pride. Despite the reporters in the parking lot and the call from Anthony Davis, Jewell had no doubt that they were telling the truth. He drove the short distance to F.B.I. headquarters in Buckhead in his own truck, but he noticed that four cars were following him. "The press is on us," Jewell told Johnson when they arrived. "No, those are our guys," Johnson told him. This tactic would continue through the next 88 days and be severely criticized: Why would you have an armada of surveillance vehicles stacked up on a suspected bomber?It was then that Jewell started to wonder why he was at the F.B.I., but he followed Johnson and Rosario inside. Rosario was known for his skills as a negotiator; he had once helped calm a riot of Cuban prisoners in Atlanta. Johnson, however, had a reputation for overreaching. In Albany, New York, in 1987, he had pursued an investigation of then mayor Thomas Whalen. According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson's assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.As Jewell sat in a small office, he wondered why the cameraman recording the interview was staring at him so intently. After an hour, Johnson was called out of the room. When he returned, he said to Jewell, "Let's pretend that none of this happened. You are going to come in and start over, and by the way, we want you to fill out this waiver of rights.""At that moment a million things were going through my head," Jewell told me. "You don't give anyone a waiver of rights unless they are being investigated. I said, 'I need to contact my attorney,' and then all of a sudden it was an instant change. 'What do you need to contact your attorney for? You didn't do anything. We thought you were a hero. Is there something you want to tell us about?'" Jewell grew increasingly apprehensive and later recalled thinking, These guys think I did this.When the agents took a break, Jewell asked to use the phone. "I called Watson four times. I called his brother. I told his parents that I had to get hold of Watson—it was urgent. I was, like, 'I have to speak to him right now.' What was going on was that Washington was on the phone with Atlanta. The people in Washington were giving them questions." Jewell said he knew this because the videotapes in the cameras were two hours long and "Johnson and Rosario would leave every 30 minutes, like they had to speak on the phone." The O.RR. report, however, would assert that no one at headquarters knew about the videotaping or the training-film ruse. Lying to get a statement out of a suspect is, in fact, not illegal, but clearly Johnson and Rosario were not making decisions on their own. Even the procedure of having a fleet of cars follow a suspect was an intimidation tactic used by the F.B.I. Later, according to Jewell, Johnson and Rosario would both tell him privately that they believed he was innocent, but that the investigation was being run by the "highest levels in Washington."Within the bureau, the belief is that during one of the telephone calls Freeh instructed Johnson and Rosario to read Jewell his Miranda rights. Freeh is said to have learned of Johnson's history from a member of his security detail, who had worked in Atlanta. He told Freeh that "Johnson had a reputation for being obnoxious and a problem." In addition, a week after Jewell's interview, Freeh reportedly received a call from Janet Reno, who had learned about the ruse from Kent Alexander, the local U.S. attorney, and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Freeh wondered aloud how it was that, of all the agents in Atlanta, Johnson had been selected to work on the Jewell case. Like Jewell, Johnson had wound up in Atlanta because of his overzealous behavior—according to an F.B.I. source, the Whalen episode had resulted in a "loss-of-effectiveness transfer," an F.B.I. euphemism. (Johnson declined to respond.)On that same Tuesday, Watson Bryant and Nadya Light closed the office early and went to Centennial Park. Light, 35, a pretty Russian immigrant, had never met Radar, Bryant's old friend, and wanted to buy him a celebratory meal. Killing time until Jewell came on duty, they went into the House of Blues and then bought some hot sauce. Walking toward his car, Bryant saw newsboys hawking the afternoon edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It was like out of a cartoon. They were all yelling!" he recalled. "I caught the headline out of the corner of my eye." The headline read: FBI SUSPECTS 'HERO' GUARD MAY HAVE PLANTED BOMB.Bryant borrowed 50 cents from Light to buy the paper and began to read: '"Richard Jewell, 33 . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber.' I could not believe it."At that moment, Bryant's brother, Bruce, who was on his way to the diving competition, got a call from Jewell. "Where is Watson?" As Bruce Bryant walked past a Speedo billboard with a TV screen, he saw Richard Jewell's face filling the screen. "Oh, my God," he said to his wife. At the same moment, Watson was in his car a block away on Northside Drive when he too noticed the Speedo screen. He could not get back to his house—the streets were blocked off for the cycling competition. From his car he called F.B.I. headquarters and demanded to speak to Jewell. "He is not here," the operator said. From his home phone, he picked up his messages and heard Jewell's low, urgent tones. "He didn't leave a number," Bryant told Light. "Call Star 69," she said. The number came back: 679-9000, the number for F.B.I. headquarters, which he had just dialed. Within minutes, Bryant had Jewell on the phone. Jewell told him he was making a training film. "You idiot! You are a suspect. Get your ass out of there now!" Bryant told him.Before The Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the story of Richard Jewell, there had been a debate in the newsroom over whether or not to name him. One block away, CNN's Art Harris and Henry Schuster had alerted the network's president that Jewell was targeted, but they held the story, because they understood its potential magnitude. At The A.J.C., Kathy Scruggs, a police reporter, who had allegedly gotten a tip from a close friend in the F.B.I., got a confirmation from someone in the Atlanta police. According to the managing editor, John Walter, the first edition of the paper that Tuesday had a brief profile of Jewell. It was dropped in later editions as Walter questioned whether the paper had enough facts to support the scoop. Because of the voice-of-God style, the paper ended up making a flat-out statement: "Richard Jewell . . . fits the profile of the lone bomber."When I asked John Walter about the lone-bomber sentence, he said, "I ultimately edited it. . . . One of the tests we put to the material is, is it a verifiable fact?" One editor added, "The whole story is voice-of-God. . . . Because we see this event taking place, the need to attribute it to sources—F.B.I. or law enforcement—is less than if there is no public acknowledgment." John Walter indicated that he had not seen a lone-bomber profile. I asked him, "Whose profile of a lone bomber does Richard Jewell fit? Where is the 'says who' in this sentence?" Walter said that he felt comfortable with the assertion.The page-one story had a double byline: Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz. Walter had told these two early on that they would be the reporters assigned to any Olympic catastrophe. Martz, who had covered the Gulf War, had been assigned the security beat for the Olympics; Scruggs routinely covered local crime. Scruggs had good contacts in the Atlanta police, and she was tough. She was characterized as "a police groupie" by one former staff member. "Kathy has a hard edge that some people find offensive," one of her editors told me, but he praised her skills. Police reporters are often "dictation pads" for local law enforcement; recently the American Journalism Review sharply criticized The A.J. C. for the scanty confirmation and lack of skepticism in its coverage of Jewell.The newsroom atmosphere resembled that at F.B.I. headquarters; there was a frenzy to be first. Kent Walker, a newsroom intern, published a story in the same edition, with a glaring mistake in the headline: BOMB SUSPECT HAD SOUGHT LIMELIGHT, PRESS INTERVIEWS. Since Ray Cleere's tip to the F.B.I., the "hero bomber" theory had been circulating among Atlanta law enforcement officers. Maria Elena Fernandez, a reporter, was sent to Habersham County on July 29. By coincidence, William Rathburn, the head of security for the Olympics, had been at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 when a fake bomb was found on a bus—left by a policeman who sought attention.On the surface, the story had an irresistible newsroom logic: Jewell was clearly looking for recognition. Bert Roughton, the city editor, had answered the telephone when a representative from AT&T called to ask if the paper would like a Jewell interview. According to Walter, Roughton himself typed a sentence in the Scruggs-and-Martz piece: "He [Jewell] also has approached newspapers, including The Atlanta JournalConstitution, seeking publicity for his actions." But he hadn't. Walter explained, "There was nothing wrong with that sentence. That's journalistically proper. It is not common practice, to my knowledge, to ask someone you are interviewing . . . 'Are you here of your own free will?'" Jewell had not contacted the paper—a fact which would have been easy enough to check. Walter became snappish when I described the sentence as "a mistake." "It was not a mistake," he said angrily. Scruggs and Martz quoted Piedmont College president Ray Cleere as backup. According to Cleere, Jewell had been "a little erratic" and "almost too excitable."There was no doubt raised by The A.J.C. about the value of Cleere's information or the fragility of the F.B.I.'s potential case. On Tuesday morning, July 30, Christina Headrick, a young intern on the paper, was sent to Buford Highway to stake out Richard Jewell's apartment. She phoned in that there were men doing surveillance. By deadline, John Walter had made a decision: he would tear up the afternoon Olympics edition and lead with Jewell.Several states away, Colonel Robert Ressler was watching CNN when the A.J.C. extra edition was shown. Ressler, who was retired from the behavioral-science unit of the F.B.I., had, along with John Douglas, developed the concept of criminal-personality profiling. He was the co-author of the Crime Classification Manual, which is used by the F.B.I. He had interviewed Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy, and as he watched the TV report, he was mystified. "They were talking about an F.B.I. profile of a hero bomber, and I thought, What F.B.I. profile? It rather surprised me." According to Ressler, the definition of "hero homicide"—a person looking for recognition without an intent to kill— perhaps emerged as "hero bomber." "There is no such classification as the hero bomber," he told me recently. "This was a myth." Later he said, "It occurred to me that there was no database of any bomber who lived with his mother, was a security guard and unmarried. How many hero bombers had we ever encountered? Only one that I know of, in Los Angeles, and his bomb did not go off." Ressler knew that something was off; profiles are developed from a complex set of evidence and facts derived only in part from a crime scene. The bomb had been deadly, which was not consistent with the "hero complex." Furthermore, he wondered, where did they get the information to put the profile together that fast? He asked himself, What came first here, the chicken or the egg? Was the so-called profile actually developed from the circumstances, or was it invented for Richard Jewell?When Jewell returned home from F.B.I. headquarters just before eight P.M., NBC was showing special Olympic coverage. He sat on the sofa and watched Tom Brokaw say, "They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still holes in this case."Jewell knew that Brokaw was his mother's favorite newsman; he looked at her and noticed "the color and the blood flow out of her face when she heard that." Bobi turned to him and asked, "What is he talking about?" Jewell later recalled, "Brokaw was talking about her son as a murderer. . . . She started crying, and what am I going to say to her? 'Mom, Watson is going to fix this'? What do you say? She doesn't hear anything anyway—she was in hysterics." At that point, Jewell said, he broke down as well.The day Watson Bryant inadvertently became the lead lawyer for Richard Jewell, he was an attorney whom almost no one in the Atlanta legal establishment had ever heard of. "Who the hell is Watson Bryant?" a caption in the daily legal sheet, the Fulton County Daily Report, would read after he had appeared on the Today show. Bryant understood Jewell's vulnerability and decided on a strategy: he would treat him as a member of his own family. In Atlanta, the Bryants were a clan: Watson's father, Goble Bryant, had been a West Point tackle, on the 1949 college all-star team; his grandfather had invented a process for putting handles on paper bags. Watson had partied through Vanderbilt University and had barely gotten accepted to law school at the University of South Carolina. He had a close relationship with his brother, Bruce, and their sister, Barbara Ann, and if he lacked staff at his office, he knew he could count on his family to pick up the slack. Bruce enlisted Jewell to help coach his junior football team; Watson had a picnic for Richard and Bobi at his parents' house at the Atlanta Country Club.When Bryant arrived at the Jewells' apartment that night, he pushed his way through the crowd standing outside in the spongy Atlanta humidity. Microphones were shoved in his face. "What is happening, Watson?" Bobi asked him. Bryant asked Jewell to speak to him alone. "I want to know if you can tell me, without any hesitation at all, if you had anything to do with the bombing," he said. "I didn't," Jewell told him. "I said, 'I am going to ask you again.' He would not look me in the eye. I said, 'Don't give me this "sir" shit.' I said, 'Richard, these people want to kill you. I cannot help you unless you tell me the absolute, unequivocal truth.' I was in his face. He said he did not have anything to do with it." Jewell was bewildered and numb, said Bryant, who left at 10:30 P.M. At midnight, Jewell called him to say, "They are massing outside the apartment, Watson."The next morning, Bryant went from talk show to talk show, starting with NBC. With the notable exception of The New York Times, virtually every newspaper in the country had picked up the A.J.C. story and run it as front-page news. There were 10,000 reporters in Atlanta; the Los Angeles Times would later call the squad bearing down on the Jewells "a massive strike force . . . Tora! Tora! Tora!" Bryant was in a daze, but he held his own. "Is it true that Jewell was at some time ordered to seek psychological counseling?" Bryant Gumbel asked him. "I know a lot of people that ought to have psychological counseling," Watson Bryant replied.By 10 A.M. he was back at the Jewells' apartment, studying a search warrant that had been delivered that day. The F.B.I., Jewell recalled, said that he could not be inside the apartment during the search. Bryant called F.B.I. headquarters: "What the hell is this? Why can't he be there?" Within an hour, at least 40 members of the F.B.I. had arrived, with dogs. "There was a physical-evidence team. There was a scientific team. There was a team for the bomb-squad people, and then the A.T.F. . . . They all had different-color shirts. Light blue for bombs, dark blue for evidence protection, red and yellow." Bryant could not believe what he was seeing. "This is like damn Six Flags over Georgia," he told them."I kept saying to Watson, 'I didn't do this.' And he said, 'Hey, kid, I believe you—we are doing what we can.'" Jewell was a gun collector. Bryant was sharp with him: "You get all those guns out of your closets and put them on your bed. We don't want any trouble."For seven hours, Jewell sat outside on the staircase in what has become one of the most famous images of last summer. Bryant had to take his daughter, Meredith, to the Olympic equestrian competition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her. As he left, he said, "Don't do anything stupid. Just shut up and let them do what they have to do." Hours passed as Jewell sat in the heat. "Finally I decided I would ask them if I could go in and use the rest room. They said, 'We got the order a couple of hours ago you could come in; you just can't get in our way.'" Jewell was told he had to wear rubber socks and gloves in order not to contaminate the site. The Jewell apartment is small—two bedrooms with a bathroom in between, a living room, an alcove dining room that has been turned into a den. As Jewell sat on the sofa, he thought he heard a crash in his bedroom. "I thought my CD player was on the floor, and I said, 'What are you-all tearing up?' and they said, 'You can't go in there right now; we are searching.' I said, 'I want to know what you-all just broke.'" One search warrant listed some 200 items the F.B.I. could confiscate, including "magazines, books . . . and photographs which would include descriptive information such as telephone numbers, addresses, affiliations and contact points of individuals involved in a conspiracy to manufacture, transport and . . . detonate . . . the explosive device used in the bombing at the Olympic Centennial Park on July 27, 1996.""They had all my pictures, all the stuff that was in the drawers. My personal things. How would you like to know that 12 different guys had been in your underwear, laid it out on the floor, probably walked on it and then folded it back up like nothing ever happened and put it in your drawer? So then Mom got to go and watch it on TV: 'Live from the Jewell house, the search continues. . . . We are expecting an arrest any minute.'"When Bobi Jewell returned home, the apartment appeared neat, until she walked into her kitchen. She looked down at her counters, where all her condiments, dog biscuits, spices, and crackers had been taken out of their Tupperware containers and placed in Ziploc bags. She began to cry. And then she went into the bedroom and "immediately started washing clothes," Jewell said.Driving home from the equestrian events, Bryant heard the live coverage of the search on the radio. "Why are you helping this guy if he's guilty?" Meredith asked.The next morning, Bryant received a copy of the F.B.I. inventory of articles confiscated in the apartment. On the list he was stunned to see "one hollowed-out hand grenade, ball-shaped" and "one hollowed-out hand grenade, pinecone-shaped." "What the hell is this?" he asked Jewell. "They were paperweights," Jewell said. "I bought them at a military store." "Oh, shit," Bryant said.For the first few days, the Jewells lived on ham omelettes; a neighbor had brought them half a ham from the Honey Baked Ham Company on Buford Highway. Bobi Jewell had a vacation scheduled, so she remained at home, lying on the bed and "listening to the ball game if it was on." For two weeks, she cleaned out her bureau drawers. Richard would spend the day watching CNN or movies such as Backdraft and Midnight Run. "I would look out the window and see about 150 to 200 press people. Then it would drop to five or six on the hill. They had one person sitting up there at all times with their binoculars." Richard believed they were being monitored. "They heard everything that was going on. They were over there with high-intensity zoom lenses. They had people over there who could read lips. They had a sound dish. They could hear everything that we said. They had a person writing down everything we said. I saw them."When Bobi walked out the door, Jewell said, they would holler obscenities and yell, 'You should both die'Once, Bobi's cat jumped on the window ledge under the curtain and the photographers began frenetically shooting pictures, believing that one of the Jewells was in the window. Sound trucks and boom microphones prevented the neighbors from getting near the apartment. Three F.B.I. agents were usually sitting near the tiny swimming pool; each time Jewell or his mother left the house, a cavalcade of unmarked cars would follow. Richard soon began to write a speech describing the horror he felt at being falsely accused. He ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, huge pans of lasagna, and can after can of Campbell's tomato soup."If my mom and I had something we wanted to talk about that we didn't want anyone to hear, we wrote it on pieces of paper. When she left to go to work the next day, she would take it with her, tear it up, and put it in the trash! That is how I kept my mother informed about what was going on with the case." The notes were specific: "What the Justice Department was saying, what my attorneys were hearing through the grapevine that I could tell my mom that was not privileged. It was mainly stuff like 'Keep the faith' and 'Can I borrow $10 for gas in the truck?' "Jewell described how, when his mother would walk out the door, "they would holler obscenities at her. They would yell, 'Did he do it? Did he blow those people up?' They would yell, 'You should both die.'" According to Jewell, "The cameramen were just trying to get us aggravated so they could get it on camera. You don't know how hard it is when they are saying stuff about my mother and me. . . . All she was trying to do was walk her dog. And she cannot do that without hearing that yelling. When someone did that to my mother, I would want to be up on the hill calling the police, because I would want them arrested. I was going to say, 'Mom, tell me which one said that!' And I was going to walk up to that person and introduce myself and say, 'Hi, my name is Richard Jewell. What is yours? Who do you work for? Who is your supervisor?' And I was going to go home and call 911 to get a warrant."By disposition, Jewell is a night person, but he would get up early when his mother went back to work and make her breakfast. By 11 A.M. he would be playing Mortal Kombat II and listening to 96 Rock on the radio, where one of his friends is a disc jockey. Four days into his period of captivity, he called the DeKalb County police. He recalled telling a Mr. Brown, "'This is Richard Jewell. I am sure you are aware of my situation over on Buford Highway.' He said, 'Yes, Richard, I know.' I said, 'I just want to tell you my situation. Number one: I did not do this. Number two: I am here and I am not leaving the apartment for any reason at all.' I said that all the press was doing right now was aggravating my mother and disturbing my neighbors, and I would really appreciate it if the neighbors could return to a normal life."On Saturday, August 3, as Bryant stared at the F.B.I. agent plucking Jewell's hair, he had already made a decision. "It was, like, screw it. I had had it." The next day was the closing ceremony of the Olympics; Bryant imagined that that would be the day the government might choose to arrest Jewell. "Who is the best criminal lawyer in Georgia?" he asked a state lawyers' association. Within a day, he had brought in Jack Martin, an expert on the federal death penalty and a Harvard law school graduate with close ties to the local U.S. attorney, Kent Alexander. "Let me tell you something about myself," Jewell told him in their first meeting. "I hate criminal lawyers." "Well, Richard," Martin said, "I don't much like cops, but sometimes I need one, and this is a time you sure need a criminal lawyer."That weekend, watching the Olympic basketball finals, Bryant had an idea: he wanted to be prepared with his own polygraph test of Jewell if the F.B.I. arrested him. From the game, Bryant called a close friend who was a former federal prosecutor. "Try Richard Rackleff," he said. "We worked together on the Walter Moody bombing case." Rackleff had recently set up a private practice, and he agreed to test Jewell the next day. On Sunday morning, Bryant was up early, unable to sleep. He drove around town, making calls from his cell phone. He dialed 679-9000—the F.B.I. "This is Watson Bryant. I am going to pick up Richard Jewell. I just want you to know that. I don't have a white Bronco. I don't have a wig, and I don't have cash in my car. We are just going to my office."Watson had coordinated an elaborate plan with his brother to dodge reporters; he would use a decoy and snake through a parking garage. Rackleff had been instructed to park blocks from Bryant's office, because his car could be identified easily, since he was well known in Atlanta law enforcement.When Rackleff sat down with Richard Jewell in the conference room, he later told me, he sensed almost immediately that Jewell was innocent. Rackleff had tested many bombers before, including Walter Moody, who was convicted of killing a federal judge. "They are strange ducks—they leave their attorneys cold," Rackleff said. Although no one knew Rackleff was in the building, more than 100 reporters gathered outside to get a look at Jewell. Inside, Jack Martin, Bryant, Nadya Light, and Jewell spent 12 hours in Bryant's office. Rackleff asked Jewell a series of questions, but the test was inconclusive. "Richard is tormented. He is exploding on the inside," Rackleff said. While he was testing him, CNN's Art Harris was visible through the window of Bryant's office, but he could not see inside. Bryant was thoroughly deflated, close to despair. "You have got to try to buck Richard up," Rackleff told him. "Who is going to buck me up?" Bryant asked.'We are not in missile range of arresting Richard Jewell, but we want him to take our own polygraph," Kent Alexander told Bryant and Jack Martin in their first meeting on the case. In the meantime, Rackleff had tested Jewell again, and he had passed with "no deception," the highest rating. By this time, it was clear that there was no damning evidence against Jewell discovered at the apartment or in his old house in Habersham County.Alexander was only 38, but he had been groomed for politics in a fancy local family. His father was a senior partner in a good Atlanta law firm, and he had worked as an intern for Senator Sam Nunn. Bryant worried about Alexander's lack of experience, but Alexander told colleagues that he was disturbed by the lack of substantial evidence against Jewell. He was trying to operate with decency, but he was cautious and had to check every detail with Washington.Bryant, however, didn't trust Alexander; he had had a bad experience with Alexander's predecessor. In 1990, Bryant had almost been put out of business in a tussle with the then U.S. attorney. The local Small Business Administration accused a bank Bryant represented of improper use of funds; the bank blamed Bryant, who was brought before a grand jury and over the next two years almost lost his practice. He spent $50,000 defending himself, and Nadya Light had to take another job, but eventually the case was settled with Bryant's agreeing not to do business with the S.B.A. for 18 months. Bryant had always felt that he had been manhandled by the office. "I learned everything I needed to know about dealing with this office in 1990," Bryant recalled telling Alexander. "No polygraph for Richard."At the meeting, Alexander told Bryant and Martin, "This is all off-the-record. This is a request that is strictly confidential." Weeks later, Louis Freeh came to town to address a breakfast of former F.B.I. agents. Almost immediately, the polygraph request was reported on CNN. "Kent, I thought we had an agreement," Bryant told him. "I cannot control Washington," Alexander said.When two of the bomb-blast victims sued Richard Jewell, Bryant brought in Wood and Grant to handle the civil litigation. Martin opposed the move. He believed in the cone of silence: "Circle the wagons and don't speak." He said that Wood and Grant had a different perspective: Attack, attack, and if you give any quarter, it is a sign of weakness. Martin had been reassured in private by Kent Alexander that Jewell was not in any immediate danger of being arrested, but the team disagreed about press tactics. Martin worked through the Atlanta-establishment back channels; Lin Wood was a rhetoric man. He favored "one big newsbreak a week." "You know who wrote the book Masters of Deceit? J. Edgar Hoover! And that was about the Communist Party in America. So now they have gone from masters of investigation to masters of deceit!" he would routinely tell reporters who called.Three days after Wood and Grant surfaced as the two new civil lawyers, a Ford van with a tinted bubble-shaped window appeared on the top level of the Macy's parking garage which faced the conference-room windows of their offices. According to Wood, the van did not move for 10 days. "We used to sit there and wave at it." Then the lawyers placed a camera in the window, and the next day the vehicle was gone. "For sure that van had laser sound-detecting equipment," Wood said.Jewell was annoyed that press descriptions of him always emphasized his "overzealousness"; he considers himself a man of details. Often, when he's watching movies at home, he freeze-frames in order to study props in scenes. The second weekend he was considered a suspect, he told me, "I walked in and I noticed white powder all over the telephone table in the conference room." It was a Saturday morning, and Jewell had been with his lawyers until late the night before. He told me he was convinced that the F.B.I. "had lifted a ceiling tile," and that the white powder was "dust that came down." Bryant and Jewell made light of it and did not sweep their phones, believing that any tap the F.B.I. would use would be of a laser or satellite variety and impossible to trace. "In the beginning of every conversation, Watson would curse for about a minute and tell them what lowlives they were. And then he would say, 'By the way, this is Richard's lawyer. Y'all can cut your tape players off,"' Jewell said. "I would call them dirty scumbags," said Bryant. But the local U.S. attorney, Kent Alexander, insisted that their phones were not tapped. "There are no wiretap warrants," he said.The F.B.I. did turn up one bit of potentially troublesome evidence in the Jewells' apartment—fragments of a fence that had been blown up in the explosion. After a telephone conversation with Watson Bryant, Kathy Scruggs quoted him saying, "Yes, he did have a sample of the blown-up bomb." Bryant accused her of egregiously misquoting him. He remembered saying to her, "Yes, Richard had souvenirs of the bombing." Scruggs had not taped their conversation. "She cut the 'ing' off of 'bomb,'" Bryant later told me, but Scruggs strongly denies this. The day the story broke, Bryant criticized Scruggs on local radio. That afternoon she appeared at his office to attempt to clear up the misunderstanding. "I don't like your reporting," Bryant recalled telling her. "I'm human, too," she said. The next day, Ron Martz inserted a quote from Bryant in an unrelated news story: "Oh, man, it's not even a scrap of the bomb—it's a piece of damned fence, for God's sake." But the quote would have little impact. Scruggs's version had been picked up; gathering force, it was eventually related by Bill Press on Crossfire on the evening of October 28: "The guy was seen with a homemade bomb at his home a few days before." (The next day CNN would be forced to apologize for the mistake.)By this time Bryant had grown enraged by the media coverage. The New York Post had called Jewell "a Village Rambo" and "a fat, failed former sheriff's deputy." Jay Leno had said that Jewell "had a scary resemblance to the guy who whacked Nancy Kerrigan," and asked, "What is it about the Olympic Games that brings out big fat stupid guys?" The A.J. C. s star columnist, Dave Kindred, had compared Jewell to serial murderer Wayne Williams: "Like this one, that suspect was drawn to the blue lights and sirens of police work. Like this one, he became famous in the aftermath of murder."Television journalism was also a revelation to Bryant; he felt he had "landed on Mars," and spent hours channel-surfing. On CNN, one criminologist said "it was possible" that Jewell had a hero complex. Bryant told his brother, Bruce, "I know I am going to sue someone. I just don't know who." Bruce Bryant searched for Jewell's name on the Internet three weeks into his ordeal and found 10,000 stories. The tone many of the journalists took was accusatory and pre-determined, with a few rare exceptions, such as that of CBS correspondent Jim Stewart. "Don't jump to any conclusion yet," he said sharply in a broadcast at the height of the frenzy.In his first week as Jewell's lawyer, Bryant went to the CNN studio to be interviewed by Larry King. After the broadcast, he was asked to stop in at the office of CNN president Tom Johnson. "They wanted to know what I thought of their reporting so far." Art Harris was in the room. "I turned around and I said to Art Harris, 'Who the hell are you and the rest of the media to make fun of how Richard Jewell and his mother live? Who are you to make fun of working people who live in a $470-a-month apartment? Is there something wrong with that? Who are you to say that he is a weirdo because he lives with his mother?' "According to Jack Martin, the F.B.I. spent weeks on one erroneous early theory—that Richard Jewell was an enraged homosexual cop-hater who had been aided in the bombing by his lover. Jewell had purportedly planted the bomb; the lover then made the 911 phone call warning that it would go off in Centennial Park. The rationale behind this idea was that Jewell was "mad at the cops and wanted to kill other cops," Martin told me.The rumor began at Piedmont College, perhaps invented by several of the students Jewell had turned in for smoking pot, but it had a chilling consequence. In mid-August, three agents appeared at the Curtis Mathes video store in Cornelia, where Chris Simmons, a senior at Piedmont, worked part-time. Simmons, a friend of Jewell's, who was engaged to be married, was a B student, but he displayed the same porcine blankness as Jewell and spoke in a slow drawl. He had a deep distrust of the government and carried a card in his pocket that read: CHRISTOPHER DWAYNE SIMMONS-CAMPAIGN SUPPORT FOR CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATES.The agents questioned Simmons in the store for one and a half hours. "They asked me if I was a homosexual. They asked me if I had accessed the Internet. . . . They later wanted to wire me. They said, 'If he is really a hero, we will find out, and if not, he has killed someone and injured a lot of people.' " Simmons was short with the agents and denied everything. They accused him of lying and said they could take him to Atlanta. The agents told someone Simmons had once worked with that Simmons might be involved in the bombing. "They kept wording questions differently. They kept saying: Do you think Richard Jewell could have done this if he believed that he could get people out in time and nobody would get hurt?" Simmons later called one of the F.B.I. agents and said, "I hear you don't believe my story." He recalled their conversation: " 'I think you are sugarcoating your answers,' he said. I said, 'Next time I talk with you, it will be with a lawyer.' And he asked me if I was threatening him. Then he hung up on me." Ultimately, Simmons volunteered to take a polygraph, which he says he passed. "I was a nervous wreck," he said. "I had only seen this on TV."What was not known outside a small circle of investigators was how deadly the Centennial Park bomb really was. It was well constructed, with a piece of metal shaped like a V, and inside, it had canisters filled with nails and screws. Jack Martin, who had spent time in Vietnam, compared its construction to that of a claymore mine, a sophisticated and lethal device. The bomb weighed more than 40 pounds. It was "a shaped charge," F.B.I. deputy director Weldon Kennedy would announce in December. It could blast out fragments from three separate canisters, but only one of the canisters exploded on July 27. Someone had moved the Alice pack slightly before the bomb detonated, causing most of the shrapnel to shoot into the sky. The composition of the bomb did not suggest the work of an amateur, Kathy Scruggs would ironically later report, after interviewing an A.T.F. chemist.As the weeks went by, Richard Jewell withdrew into a state of psychological limbo; he began to try to analyze what the agents might think of his behavior within the small apartment. "I would be watching a spy show on TV or something like a John Wayne movie. Someone would be talking about blowing something up, and I would think to myself, My God, that is going to sound really bad if they think I am listening to that." He worried that "they would think I was some kind of a nut," and often, when he could not sleep, he would find himself consciously switching to exercise videos and soap operas.Over Labor Day weekend, he drove up to Habersham County for a picnic with his ex-girlfriend's family, the Chastains. As usual, three F.B.I. cars followed him, but he had gotten adept at picking out the unmarked vehicles. As Jewell drove into town, he noticed that white ribbons hung from hundreds of trees; the Chastains had organized a campaign in his behalf. On the way home, Jewell drove with his friend Dave Dutchess. For the first time, he did not see an F.B.I. car following him, but he noticed an airplane flying low overhead. He drove another 20 miles, and the plane was still on him. "I said, 'Dave, do you think the F.B.I. would be following us in an airplane? It wouldn't be that hard to do, if they put some kind of beeper on the car.'" The plane followed them through Gainesville all the way to Atlanta—an hour's drive. "Just to make sure, we got off on an exit ramp and went about five miles back north. And I got out and took a picture. They followed us all the way back to the apartment! And they circled the apartment for about 15 minutes, until the F.B.I. car showed back up. I got very emotional. My cheeks got beet red. And Mom came home and said, 'What is going on? What is the matter?' It just destroyed the whole day."On September 2, Dave Dutchess and his fiancee, Beatty, were driving to their house in Tennessee. It was raining hard, and they noticed they were being followed by several F.B.I. cars. The storm grew worse, and they stopped at a hotel for the night. The next day, while getting coffee at a McDonald's, they were surrounded by F.B.I. agents. "We just want to talk to you. We are trying to be discreet." One agent, Dutchess recalled, spoke into his radio: "We have the suspect in hand." As they walked back toward their car, Dutchess said to Beatty, "They think I am his accomplice. I heard on the news they were looking for his accomplice!"After the interview, which lasted several hours, Dutchess spoke to Watson Bryant. "What did they ask you that concerns you?" Bryant asked him. "Well, I decided that I had to tell them the truth. Me and one of my friends used to set off pipe bombs for fun," Dutchess told him. "What?" Bryant exclaimed, incredulous. "Yeah, I told them we liked to throw pipe bombs down gopher holes when we lived out in West Virginia.""Did Richard know this friend?" Bryant asked apprehensively. "Hell, no. He never met him," Dutchess said, but Bryant knew that this could prolong the F.B.I.'s investigation perhaps by months. "I hung up and I was thinking, I cannot believe that I even know anyone who throws pipe bombs into gopher holes."As part of their strategy, Wood and Grant decided to mount a strong counterattack against the government. Wayne Grant had come up with the idea: Bobi Jewell should hold a press conference during the Democratic convention and make a direct plea to Bill Clinton. The day before she was to appear, Grant rehearsed her. It was difficult to work with Bobi; she was exhausted and could not stop crying. Confined under siege for almost a month, she could not see an end to it, since every day brought a new humiliation. The resident manager had threatened to take away their lease, and the manager's son was out selling pictures he took of them. A close friend from church was dying, Bobi said, and Richard could not go to see him, because of the swarm of F.B.I. agents and reporters who followed him everywhere. All of it came out in a rush in the conference room with Wayne Grant: Bobi had even had to give Bryant and Nadya Light the Olympic-basketball tickets she had won as colleague of the year, and every night she and her son were stuck together, staring at each other across the kitchen table. They were often irritable, and Richard sometimes lost his temper. "Mother, just shut up," he would tell her when she nagged him about the case. Then, Bobi later recalled, she would go into her bedroom and lie on the four-poster bed hoping that the photographers who rented an apartment across the way for $1,000 a day had no way of knowing what was going on.Grant kept careful notes on the session. Bobi was terrified about appearing in front of cameras. She sobbed and told him, "If I go on TV Monday, I'll be embarrassed. It will be, like, whenever I go anywhere, people will be looking at me: 'Did he do it or didn't he do it?' ""If you talked to the person who is in charge of the investigation, what would you say?" Grant asked her calmly. Bobi's voice was halting, but she was firm: "He is innocent. Clear his name and let us get back to a life that is normal."A few weeks later, Wayne Grant went to a party for a Bar Mitzvah, and a guest cornered him. She asked him if he had told Bobi Jewell to cry at the end of her press conference, and then added coldly, "Nice touch."The lawyers' strategy worked: after Bobi's press conference, the Jewells were deluged with interview requests. Bryant often received 100 phone calls a day. Bobi soon developed a system: letters from Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jessy Raphael, and TV producers were stacked on the console in the living room; flowers and baskets of Godiva chocolates and cheese and crackers from the networks were sent to the offices of Wood & Grant and then on to a children's hospital.At the U.S. Attorney's Office, it had become increasingly clear to Kent Alexander that something had to be done about Richard Jewell. Janet Reno had seen Bobi Jewell on TV and was moved by her sincerity. Privately, Reno and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick were said to be concerned about the heavy-handed tactics of the F.B.I. "The case had become a total embarrassment," a Justice Department official told me, but Alexander was in a complicated situation. He was working closely with the F.B.I., and there was no sign that the bureau was ready to let go, despite growing consternation among the local agents that the Washington command center had mishandled the case. And there was another problem: Alexander did not trust Lin Wood.By late September, there was a tremendous strain within the team Bryant had hastily assembled. The other lawyers accused Jack Martin of cutting private deals with his friend Kent Alexander, pulling focus, and not being tough enough. For his part, Alexander, according to Martin, admired Bryant even though he believed he was a loose cannon, but he was fed up with Lin Wood."Alexander would say something fairly candid to me, and I would report it to the attorneys, and the next day he would see it on TV," said Jack Martin. "Alexander had checked out Lin, and he knew that he was a take-no-prisoners guy." The lawyers often argued among themselves. Wood insisted on a full-blowout press-attack strategy. Bryant had mastered his sound bite: "The F.B.I. is a 500-pound gorilla who will kick the shit out of anyone." Martin wanted the lawyers to ease up on the hyperbole: "I would say, 'We do not need to do this.' And Lin would say, 'Let's go public with this.' He was manic about it." In one argument, Wood told him, "Goddamn it, Martin, you're like my ex-wives. There isn't anything you can say I won't object to."There was an atmosphere of extreme apprehension between Bryant and Jewell as they drove to F.B.I. headquarters on the afternoon of October 6. They were on their way to what would seemingly be a session with conclusional overtones, but Jewell was worried: What if this meeting was a trick? It was difficult to believe that the bureau was really ending its two-month-long investigation into his life. For weeks, Jack Martin and Bryant had been going back and forth with Kent Alexander. Finally, Jewell had agreed to an unusual suggestion: if he submitted to a lengthy voluntary interview with the bureau, and if Division 5 was satisfied, then perhaps the Justice Department could issue a letter publicly stating that he was no longer a suspect. Jewell tried to imagine the questions he would be asked. "I wanted to look at everything from their angle," he told me, "trying to assess it and reassess it in my head."On the day of Jewell's exoneration, Jay Leno apologized for having called him a Unadoofus.Kent Alexander had set a firm ground rule: Only one lawyer representing Jewell could be in the room. It had been agreed that Jack Martin, the criminal specialist, would be the man, which enraged Lin Wood. "You could really see how these guys did not like each other," Jewell said."I am not comfortable with the one-lawyer agreement," Wood told John Davis, Kent Alexander's second-in-command, when they were assembled. "We have an agreement. If you attempt to renegotiate it, I will have egg on my face," Davis said, adding, "You are not a man of your word." With that, Wood recalled, he rose from his chair and started screaming, "You are not going to say that to me, you son of a bitch!" Kent Alexander interrupted, saying, "This is deteriorating. We aim to stop this. Let's just regroup."When Jewell, Davis, and Martin finally sat down for the interview, Larry Landers, a special agent with the G.B.I., and F.B.I. special agent Bill Lewis had lists of questions with blank space for answers in front of them. On the wall of the windowless room, there were extensive aerial photographs of the park and, as a prop, an actual park bench was later brought in. Martin believed that the agents intended to resolve areas in the affidavits and other questions: Had Richard ever accessed Candyman's Candyland for information on the Anarchists' Cookbook? Had Richard picked up any pieces of pipe when the park was under construction? Had he told anyone, "Take my picture now, because I am going to be famous"? None of this had happened, Jewell said. All he could remember telling someone was that he was off to Atlanta and "going to be in that mess down there," meaning the traffic jams. They pressed him about seemingly inconsistent statements he had made on the morning of the bombing: Why had he told Agent Poor everything was normal when he checked the perimeter of the fence? Jewell explained that he had been walking the "inside of the fence." He once again explained that he had wanted to work the sound-and-light tower so that he could watch the entertainment; he had arranged for his mother to hear Kenny Rogers four days before the explosion.The area, he told Landers, was "a sweet site" and a great place to look at girls. During a break, Martin asked about all his references to women. Jewell said he wanted them to know he wasn't gay. On several occasions, Landers became annoyed: Why couldn't Jewell pin down the times? Had he seen the drunks on the bench between 10:30 and 11 or between 11 and 11:30? Why hadn't he looked at his watch? Jewell later recalled, "I said, 'I don't go through my life looking at my watch. I don't care about time. When the bomb went off, I did not look at my watch.' They were wanting to know what time I went to the bathroom and stuff like that. When you have the runs, you are not really concerned about what time it is. You are concerned with getting to the bathroom."On the day after the F.B.I. meeting, Jack Martin dictated a 27-page account of everything that had been said during the six-hour interview. In the last moments, Davis said, "he wanted to give Richard the opportunity once and for all to say that he didn't do it." Jewell, Martin wrote, "unequivocally and fortunately said that he had nothing to do with the bomb and didn't know anything about the bomb and if he did he would be the first to deliver the bastard to their door." When Martin walked out, he thought to himself, This really was a formality. They had nothing.In November a rumor swept through the newsroom of The A.J.C. that Cox newspaper executives were rethinking their news policies. According to one reporter, "The sloppiness of the Jewell reporting and the lack of sources was the last straw." A reporter named Carrie Teegardin was assigned to write a piece examining how the media spotlight was turned on Richard Jewell. In large part, her article wound up being an examination of the role of The A.J.C. After Wood and Grant threatened to sue, the article was killed. "We didn't get through the editing of it," John Walter said. "The Jewells' attorney began saying, 'We're thinking lawsuit' . . . and that made us more cautious." Meanwhile, Lin Wood and Wayne Grant were busy holding meetings with lawyers from NBC and Piedmont College. At NBC, Tom Brokaw's carelessness reportedly cost the network more than $500,000 to settle Jewell's claims, although Jewell's lawyers would not confirm a figure, BROKAW GOOFED AND NBC PAID, the New York Daily News would later headline. In talks with Ray Cleere, the figure of $450,000 by way of settlement was first suggested, then withdrawn when Piedmont College learned that it had insurance. "This will cost them millions now," Lin Wood believes.On one occasion I asked Richard Jewell if he had any theories about who might have placed the bomb. Jewell said he had popped "two or three theories off the top of my head" on the night he was interviewed by the F.B.I. "I have gone over that night hundreds of times in my head. You try to think, What type of person would do that? I know it is someone who wanted to hurt people. It is someone who is sick. I hope they find him so he can get the help he needs. Because I am totally torn up about what happened. Every day I think about it, and I will think about it for the rest of my life."Jewell often speaks with Bryant three times a day. As Jewell searches for a new job, he hangs around Bryant's office, and he recently studied handwriting analysis at the police academy. He has been offered several security jobs with Georgia companies, but he is hoping he will be hired as a Cobb County deputy. In the meantime, Bryant, Wood, and Grant have become sought-after speakers on the First Amendment.At F.B.I. headquarters in late October, Bobi Jewell broke down and cried as she identified their possessions—the Disney tapes, the Tupperware, Richard's AT&T uniforms, address books. It was a tableau of ordinary middle-class life, laid out on brown paper on a long conference-room table. "I just don't fucking believe this," Watson Bryant said angrily as he packed Bobi's videos into packing crates. "The agents tried to shake my hand," Bobi told me. "I wouldn't touch them." It took 10 hours to remove their possessions, Bobi recalled, and four minutes to return them.The F.B.I. is working on a new and elaborate theory of who did place the bomb in Centennial Park. There is an informed opinion that the backpack discovered a week earlier had in fact been a test run to check F.B.I. procedures, and that the bomber—perhaps a member of a militia group—was quite experienced and had struck before. After a torrent of criticism in the press, Louis Freeh announced that the F.B.I. had arrested Harold Nicholson, an alleged spy for Russia, and he used the opportunity to appear on the Today show and Good Morning America, hyping his role in what was a minor arrest, according to one former F.B.I. agent.In Australia in November, Bill Clinton was asked about his campaign contributions from Indonesia. "One of the things I would urge you to do, remembering what happened to Mr. Jewell in Atlanta, remembering what has happened to so many of the accusations . . . that have been made against me that turned out to be totally baseless, I just think that we ought to . . . get the facts out." When Jewell learned of his comment, he pulled up the transcript from the Internet and became angry: "The president is just using me, like everyone else."What rights does a private citizen have against the government? The legal precedent for suing the F.B.I., Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents, focuses on the behavior of individual agents. Wood believes that Jewell has a strong case against Johnson and Rosario. When Wood learned of Colonel Ressler, he hired him as a possible trial expert. In December, the F.B.I. announced that it would pay up to $500,000 to anyone who could lead it to the Olympic Park bomber.As Jewell and I drove back from Habersham County in November, he went over the early-morning hours of July 27: "I remember all of the people who were my responsibility. I remember the guys' faces who were flying through the air. I remember people screaming. The sirens going off. I don't think I will ever forget any of that. You just kind of wish sometimes. You think, Could I have done something else? . . . What if we only had five more minutes? Then maybe nobody would have been hurt. But you are what-if-ing. I have been over it a thousand times. I think we could not have done it any better. I think that is something I will always be wondering."He said he was not sure if he would ever get a job in law enforcement again, particularly since he had been held up as a cartoon figure. On the day of Jewell's exoneration, Jay Leno apologized for having called him a Unadoofus, and said, "If Jewell wins his lawsuit with NBC, he will be my new boss." He later said that this was "the greatest week in trailer-park history." The Atlanta radio station 96 Rock had put billboards of Jewell all over town; "Freebird," they said, a reference to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Jewell would later file suit against the station, but the billboard's message was clear. Jewell knows that for many people in America there will perhaps always be a subtle doubt: What if, after all, Richard Jewell really did do it? What if the government let him go simply because it could not make its case? Then he becomes not the innocent Richard Jewell, but the Richard Jewell who may be innocent. "You don't get back what you were originally," he told me. "I don't think I will ever get that back. The first three days, I was supposedly their hero—the person who saves lives. They don't refer to me that way anymore. Now I am the Olympic Park bombing suspect. That's the guy they thought did it. " February 1997 | Vanity Fair

《理查德朱维尔的哀歌》个人观影随笔，欢迎理性讨论，不喜勿喷 东木老爷子都快90岁了，还能拍出这样的电影，实在是令人敬佩，说来很奇怪，每次看老爷子的电影，不管是他主演还是他导演都特别稳，他拍的东西充满了一种沧桑感，对这个世界的理解和认知总是多了一层长辈的语境。

之前他拍的《萨利机长》，《换子疑云》，《骡子》都是根据真人真事改编的，似乎老爷子对现实世界有很多话想说，不管愤怒，还是感动，这些电影都代表了一种态度，或左或右，我看短评里有些人说女权人士不喜欢，说老爷子是保守派等等，好吧，这些声音当然可以有，我却有不同的看法，不过保留吧，每个人都有自己都意见，只是电影怎么拍，他只是针对角色，就像昆汀拍《好莱坞往事》，有时候界限和创作是矛盾的，大家变得严肃谨慎，在这种只有一个声音的地方，我已经受够了冠冕堂皇和条条框框，希望能有个平衡吧，不敢说了。

说说电影吧，朱维尔的演员演出了很多角色内在的东西，把一个普普通通有缺点的人刻画的惟妙惟肖，当角色不听律师的话喃喃自语时，甚至真的有种想让他闭嘴的冲动，当然越是这样想，越是因为演得传神，还有律师山姆，他的很多角色都没什么区别，从最早看他的《月球》，《火柴人》到《三块广告牌》，好像都是一种人，不过很喜欢这种表演风格，有点痞痞的，目中无人的样子，很有个人魅力的演员。

看完电影后，我一直在想，如果我是理查德朱维尔，该如何为自己辩护？

好人尽责值守，挽救生命却成了被告人，这种让好人蒙冤的情节，咱这也有，不过不能说，我可能会哭，会委屈，会咆哮，可我却不知道怎么表达，理查德朱维尔在最后对着联邦调查员说的话，其实比任何辩护都有力量，东木老爷子也在讽刺这些人，不过FBI和记者这两个角色，个人感觉不够立体，太脸谱化了，或许出了这种恐怖袭击事件，不管什么制度，都会有不负责任的各种坏人，这只跟人性有关！

Watson生气的对Jewell说，这些破事怎么就不会让你像我这样气急败坏。

Jewell当然生气，甚至不会有人比他更生气，但他就是不会将气愤表现出来。

他两次捂住胸口甚至都没人看见，导演用片尾字幕44岁死于心脏病轻描淡写的呼应，更让他的人生令人扼腕。

Richard Jewell是个好人，彻头彻尾的好人，但人好的太彻底，就变成了烂好人。

而烂好人的最大特点就是替一切人着想，对一切人解释一切人的行为原因。

他向来抄家的警察解释东西的用处，引来Watson的白眼；对母亲解释FBI行为的原因，遭到母亲的呵斥；甚至在因电视音量过大和母亲争执，导致母亲走到厕所哭泣的时候，还要和其他人解释，母亲哭泣的原因。

他在自己糟透了的情况下，还在为让一切人能更好的理解眼前的事物而操心。

最让人窒息的不是黑暗，而是身处黑暗中的无力感。

母亲哭着从厕所出来，不是埋怨儿子对自己大小声，而是哭诉自己不知道怎么从这些人中保护儿子。

这是无能为力的绝望。

Kathy原本是个很有张力的角色，但没有设置好。

她转变的有些生硬，前期太过强硬和不择手段，后期又突然变得怜悯和多愁善感。

其实对于记者来说，第一手资料相当重要，当她得知FBI的调查对象时候，马上惊呼对就是他，我怎么没想到。

是因为的确Jewell的一切背景资料太像会这样做的人。

记者的第一职责就是报道真相。

所以她的问题不在于是否报道，而在于她如何认定真相。

她用逻辑可能推导真相属于判断能力的范畴，这和单纯的为了出名而捏造事实是不同的。

因此如果前期少些张扬，后期省去眼泪。

会让人减少一些恶的既定印象。

我觉得这样更好是因为，对比于因恶而受害，因主观非恶而造成重大伤害，更值得我们思考。

更能让人们在做出判断前更加谨慎。

在给Jewell送将他剔除出调查对象的通知时，Shaw警官依然认为Jewell就是罪犯。

他为什么这么认定？

我的感觉，是他将Jewell是调查对象透露出去的，这是严重违纪的事情。

因此在他的心理判定上，只要将罪行坐实，Jewell就是罪犯。

他还能自我安慰，我至少透露出去的是事实。

但如果不是，那他不单是泄密，还是错的。

他可能接受不了。

因此原本应该不带任何倾向性的调查，变成了想方法坐实罪行。

所以就这么一次天雷勾地火的冲动，就让一个可能原本非恶的记者，和原本可能非恶的警察，变成了恶的最大推手。

结尾，启动调查88天后，Richard Jewell被排除出调查名单，并在6年后彻底洗清。

但依然让人耿耿于怀。

并非只是他的英年早逝。

还有就是，Who Cares？

对所有人来说Richard Jewell就是一个三十多岁了还和母亲住在一起的肥宅保安。

是茶余饭后的谈资，而对于他被打得稀烂的生活，有谁在乎吗。

花絮：1.Bobbi Jewell要求将Kenny Rogers的音乐会包含在电影中，她是他的忠实粉丝。

2.影片中音乐会和爆炸现场的拍摄地点，就是当时的亚特兰大百年奥林匹克公园的原始事件地点。

3.Paul Walter Hauser为了这个角色增重25磅。

4.剧本的素材来源包括一本叫《嫌疑人》（The Suspect）的书，是由时任佐治亚州北部地区美国检察官肯特·亚历山大 (Kent Alexander) 和1990年代《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal) 驻亚特兰大编辑凯文·萨尔文 (Kevin Salwen) 撰写的。

记者 Kathy Scruggs 从未透露过她的消息来源。

但《嫌疑人》中指向的是首席联邦调查局特工唐·约翰逊（Don Johnson）。

在电影中，首席联邦调查局特工汤姆·肖（Tom Shaw）是虚构的名字。

5.Leonardo DiCaprio和Jonah Hill曾在某个时间点作为Watson和Richard的扮演者进入计划，但最终未能成型。

不过他俩依然都是本片的执行制片。

6.爆炸后电视采访中的Richard Jewell是现实的Richard Jewell，只是声音被Paul Walter Hauser的所取代。

7.本片因描写Kathy Scruggs是通过性服务以换取情报而备受指责。

现实中，没有证据表明她这么做了。

8.现实中，记者Kathy Scruggs一直与抑郁症与成瘾症作斗争，她于2001年因药物过量去世。

疫情在北美持续爆发， 整个电影行业都面临着停工， 有些电影的上映被无限延期， 有些电影选择跳过院线，直接转向了流媒体。

在有限的选择中，有一部今年必看的美国电影 ---《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》

理查德·朱维尔的哀歌 (2019)8.22019 / 美国 / 剧情 传记 犯罪 / 克林特·伊斯特伍德 / 保罗·沃尔特·豪泽 山姆·洛克威尔

电影海报今年已经九十岁的导演克林特·伊斯特伍德可以说是当代劳模， 依然有着旺盛的创作欲， 在拍出了《美国狙击手》、《萨利机长》、《15时17分，启程巴黎》一系列根据真实事件改编的电影之后， 把目光投向了矛盾更为激烈的1996年美国亚特兰大爆炸案， 影片在去年12月上映之后占领了北美圣诞档，在观众中收获了极高的评价，获得了烂番茄77%的新鲜度和96%的爆米花指数。

rottentomatoes.com今年1月又在内地院线上映，至今保持着豆瓣8.2的高分， 这部根据真实事件改编的电影，到底有什么特别之处？

故事是基于美国调查记者玛丽·布伦纳于1997年发表在著名生活杂志《名利场》上的同名报告文学《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》，

报告文学《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》 主人公理查德·朱维尔是亚特兰大奥林匹克公园的一名普通保安， 在巡逻时发现了可疑的背包， 于是立刻组织疏散人群， 避免了更大规模的的人员伤亡， 于是，朱维尔一夜之间成为了英雄， 但是，为什么要叫「哀歌」呢？

不幸的是，没过几天，他就从人人称颂的英雄变成了爆炸案主谋的嫌疑人。

而这一切的源头就是FBI对理查德的调查和怀疑， 由演员保罗·沃尔特·豪泽 (Paul Walter Hauser)饰演的理查德，表面上看起来憨厚老实，其实性格和生活上有很多问题， 比如，曾因为肥胖被歧视、和母亲同住、制作过炸药、幻想成为警察等等，

理查德（保罗·豪泽饰）而此时毫无头绪，找不到任何嫌疑人的FBI探员， 在没有任何证据的情况下， 仅凭犯罪侧写就把他锁定成了头号嫌疑人， 开始自圆其说，过度解读他的一举一动， 比如， 他没有足够的时间从电话亭回到公园，所以一定有同伙， 为了破案，执法者究竟还做了些什么呢？

就算之后知道了他是清白的，仍然将错就错， 千方百计诱导他签字、录音， 甚至把正在调查朱维尔的信息走漏给了记者，

就这样，导致后续事件滚雪球般迅速发酵， 为了报纸头条可以不顾一切的记者凯西·斯克鲁格斯， 不仅侵犯了朱维尔的隐私，检查他的税务记录， 还曝光了他曾经收到过的处罚，从而借题发挥， 引发了各路媒体对他的妄加猜测， 甚至日夜围堵在理查德家门口，对他和母亲的人身自由造成巨大的威胁， 记者凯西收获了全报社的掌声， 却为了制造热点把朱维尔推向风口浪尖。

「反转」比「英雄」更有吸引力， 所以真相真的重要吗？

在媒体飞速发展的当下， 一件小事可以被无限放大， 媒体为了引导舆论可以不择手段， 而舆论也严重影响了人们对一件事情的判断， 媒体，无疑成为这场冤案的最大助推手， 也成就了这个时代的哀歌。

朱维尔原型 影片的特别之处在于， 把重心放在了主角朱维尔在事件发生后的经历， 情节紧扣他矛盾的性格和跌宕的际遇， 朱维尔并没有在爆炸中受伤，却成为了第113个受害者， 然而，在权力和舆论的双重打击下， 始终坚持着他的人生观，努力捍卫自己的正义， 最终，以一人之力对抗强大的舆论力量。

影片结尾以朱维尔振奋人心的发布会演讲， 展现了一场非常强有力的反击。

电影把每个角色都塑造得丰满立体， 朱维尔最后能成功证明自己的清白， 还少不了辩护律师沃森·布莱恩特和自己母亲的帮助。

律师沃森（山姆·洛克威尔饰）与朱维尔不同， 他一开始就对调查人员毫无信任，甚至对司法系统感到愤怒， 影片也有他威胁FBI探员、去找记者理论的场景， 而他办公室反复出现的“I fear government more than I fear terrorism.” （相比恐怖主义，我更害怕政府）也似乎暗示了导演想要表达的主题。

律师沃森 他对朱维尔的信任和追求真相的精神， 也让他成为朱维尔在舆论爆发之后唯一的希望， 在他的建议下，朱维尔还顺利通过了测谎仪的检测， 最终实现了自我成长。

奥斯卡得主山姆·洛克威尔施展出作为演员的可塑性， 在律师这个角色上展现了惊人的魅力。

同样作为“老戏骨”的凯西·贝茨也发挥了绝佳演技， 她扮演的母亲波比·朱维尔（凯西·贝茨饰）作为爆炸案的第114个受害者， 始终相信并支持着朱维尔 --“我不知道如何保护你”， 发布会上为朱维尔辩护的发言也让人动容， 她也因为这个角色拿到了2020年奥斯卡最佳女配角的提名。

再说影像风格， 影片运用连贯性剪辑， 给人流畅、舒适的观感， 同时利用了光影， 比如， 在朱维尔、律师和两名FBI探员同时出现的镜头中， 灯光主要关照的是朱维尔和律师， 让观众更集中关注场景中重要的焦点，

有趣的光影而此时，探员一面逐渐模糊，处于画面的次要位置， 这一段也是朱维尔第一次对FBI探员进行反击。

拍摄这部影片时已近九十岁的伊斯特伍德， 以平稳的拍摄手法有效地传达影片主题， 观点犀利，态度明确， 就像平静中给人的一记重拳， 借朱维尔这个角色， 无情地指出新闻媒体和执法机构在“舆论法庭”中扮演的不光彩角色， 映射整个现实社会，有着强有力的现实意义。

理查德·朱维尔的哀歌， 不仅仅在于他作为个体被侵犯的尊严， 甚至即使这样依然选择屈服， 更在于当下被媒体、公权所扭曲事实，蒙蔽双眼的整个社会。

经历了88天后，FBI正式终止了对朱维尔的调查， 而最后的最后， 真凶也浮出水面， 爆炸案的真实起因， 其实是基督教恐怖主义成员埃里克·鲁道夫， 为了表达对克林顿在堕胎议题上立场的不满， 安置炸弹企图阻止奥运会的进行。

而此时早已没有媒体的身影， 失去热度的真相已无人关心。

这个社会， 只有掌握了话语权的小部分人才说了算， 就像电影最后理查德所说的，

那么同理，到底还该不该去扶摔倒的老人呢？

一直以来以成为警长探员为目标的男主，生活里做了很多越界的事情，高速上抓酒驾这种，做着一系列正义的事情，但是收到的却是数不清的投诉。

也因为这份正义，他发现了一个可疑包裹，于是拯救了很多性命。

他成了英雄，但却遭受举报，怀疑，调查。

他的母亲只为他骄傲了三天。

他的墨镜也只带了三天。

即使如此，在被调查的过程里仍然对企图欺骗他获取将他送去电击的探员们以尊重与配合。

即使遭受委屈之下还表示他们代表着美国政府。

但是日积月累之下，他终于在某一刻他发起了质问，警探们所花费的时间有获取到任何证据吗？

在警探们全力追究他的时间里，真正的嫌犯是否还会制造第二次爆炸，以后任何的保安在看到可疑包裹时还会上报吗？

不会，他们不想成为下一个朱维尔。

可是，六年后，朱维尔肩上佩戴了一枚有权威的标志，他曾经向往的，又失望了的标志。

生活可能就是这个样子哦，无论遭受了多少，生活还是要继续，以自己也不确定的方式生活。

两大权威，政府和媒体，都使出了强大的火力射向了这个挽救了很多条性命的英雄身上。

那时的媒体还很少，网络信息流转还没有那么快，导向性书写新闻的媒体人还很少，当时为了销量，她会不惜一起去寻找头版。

但最后她还会去验证真实性，还会流下眼泪。

可是，她确实毁了一个男人的生活。

如今呢，新闻已经不是真正媒体人在写了，我们看到的更不见的是什么真实了，那些为了流量而引导性的文字，真的是一把把匕首，不知道无意间就刺向了何人。

不知道会坏到什么程度呢？

再说男主的性格，一根筋的正义，毫无怀疑的相信着那个圆形的标志及其背后。

善解人意到善解要将他推向万劫不复之地的人。

律师和他的妈妈一定都有一种怒其不争之感，可是最后的质问还是很意外闪光的。

电影节奏还不错，穿插着幽默，不会一直沉重沉闷，但是有些情节有些让我觉得混乱，那个安装窃听以及第一次被安排来窃听的人物的身份直到那么久远才弄清楚。

有一点我怀疑，警察用欺骗的方式抓走嫌疑人？

真的可以这样子吗？

我旁边的女士一开始就睡着了，好像是爆炸声把她弄醒了。

这一次只有一个人拿起了手机，但是有着听起来像是五十岁或以上的女士在讲解。

不过算是我还比较不错的一次观影体验了。

PS：幸好没耽误董老师进场。

再一次掉了手机又从原地儿找回来了。

😂

看这部电影之前，我是抱着一种看悲剧的心态来看的。

我特意把这部电影放在近期观影列表的最后，我特意挑了一个阳光明媚的周末，我特意在抱餐一顿心情愉悦的状态下开启这部电影。

可能因为我心太软，忍不了看悲剧，毕竟都“哀歌”了，肯定惨。

但是，看电影的过程，是我不断黑人问号的过程？

这理查德哪里哀歌了？

他有一个爱他的妈妈，有一个真心对他的律师朋友，有一个不离不弃的发小，还有一个不操心不焦虑的乐观性格，简直是美国“肥猫”，人生赢家了。

再看他的遭遇，做英雄挺身而出，虽然中间被诬陷，但最后沉冤得雪，连诬陷他的记者都留下了忏悔的泪水。

并且，在被诬陷的过程中，身边的家人朋友，始终信任支持支持他，连诬陷他的人也一直在遵守规则的前提下，只有诬陷，没有“栽赃”，没有“屈打成招”。

故事的结尾，他也实现了自己的梦想，重新当上了警察。

所以？

“哀歌”？

哀在何处呢？

这不是合家欢的喜剧吗，主角实现梦想，连配角都抱得美人归，皆大欢喜，普天同庆啊。

不对，我眉头一紧，发现事情并没有那么简单。

仔细一想，这个翻译电影名字的朋友，有点东西。

仔细想一下，对于主角来说，是喜剧，对于电影中的其他人来说，是一场悲剧，这场悲剧不仅由他们的遭遇来演绎，也由他们的人性来诠释。

FBI的肖恩探长，以为这个案子是个香饽饽，第一时间把案子抢了过来，想要靠这个案子平步青云。

案件没有头绪的时候，突然天降线人，理查德的前老板来电举报；感觉这个案子马上就要顺利结案，又来一个火辣的美女记者投怀送抱。

简直是事业爱情双丰收，铁树又逢第二春。

但大喜之后的大悲，总是最熬人的，春风得意的肖恩探长，费劲心机折腾了半天，把时间全耗在一个错误的嫌疑人身上，最后只能灰头土脸，黯然离场。

他最开始的一切梦想：破案升官当神探，一个都没有实现，电影没有交代他的结局，但结局想必也是仕途尽毁，抱憾一生。

报社女记者，自诩八面玲珑，黑白通吃，为了要信息，不惜用自己的身体来交换。

她身上是有一股韧劲的，当男主律师一遍一遍的赶她下车，她都能够厚着脸皮赖着不走。

这股韧劲，这股子非要出人头地非要“成功”的韧劲，让她得到了内部消息，让她收获了办公室里所有人的掌声，让她似乎以为自己走向人生的巅峰。

可人生就是这样，巅峰后面，必然要有一个低谷，后续的发展不断打脸，案情毫无进展，接着被律师上门当众羞辱。

从一个掌声中的明星，成为一个被围观的小丑。

最后她忏悔的泪水，也不能挽回她最终落寞于职场的宿命。

是的，这是一部悲剧电影，这是一首哀歌，只不过这个悲剧不属于男主，这首哀歌不为男主而奏。

那肖恩探长、女记者的悲剧遭遇，其根源在哪里？

上面我说了，因为他们的人性，因为他们的三观。

康德说，人应该是目的，而不仅仅是手段。

探长和记者的悲剧命运，也许就来源于此，他们把人当成了手段，而不是目的。

在他们眼中，男主是他们破案升官的砝码，是他们出新闻抢流量的工具，而男主到底是不是清白的，男主到底是在想些什么的，男主的痛苦、气愤，他们都不关心。

在他们眼里，理查德·朱维尔，只是一个名字一个代号一个物品，但并不是，一个人。

他们这种对于人的态度，直接导致了他们的悲剧的结局。

有意思的是，越是把人当作手段的人，往往有一种韧劲、有一种执着，这种韧劲和执着在其他场合可能会实现成功，但是对于这种把人当作手段的人，悲剧命运是早就注定好的，韧劲和执着只会加速悲剧的发展。

东木导演，作为世界上最年长的导演，他经历了人生的一切，看透了人生中的一切，他的电影中也往往带有一种充满人生经验和人生哲理的厚重感。

这一首哀歌，看起来属于探长和记者，在探长和记者的背后，那些同样把男主作为谈资、封为英雄、踩在脚底；那些同样把一个人作为手段，而没有真正去关注人、尊重人的政客、明星、以及每一位吃瓜群众来说，这一首哀歌，也为他们响起。

作者：csh本文首发于《陀螺电影》 像《骡子》与《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》这样的作品，在院线电影中实在太罕见了。

观众们或许很难辨明它们的独特之处，但它们确实能够给人一种极为流畅、舒适的观感。

而这恰恰是因为，伊斯特伍德的这些作品，保持着某种惊人的古典性。

如果说新浪潮的猛将、时年89岁的让-吕克·戈达尔，直至2018年的《影像之书》为止，都在试图创造更加新奇的影像；那么与戈达尔一同出生于1930年的伊斯特伍德，恰恰就是古典好莱坞风格的捍卫者。

在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中，他仍旧在使用着这种锤炼了数十年的古典技艺。

或许许多欧洲电影迷、尤其是新浪潮爱好者，会对这种传统抱持着某种轻蔑的态度。

但是，古典之所以能够成为古典，其实也有它的道理——这种影像之所以能够给人带来最为流畅、舒适的观感，其实是经过时间检验的。

那么，什么是好莱坞的古典主义风格？

它主要指涉的是好莱坞古典时期电影中，以连贯性剪辑系统为主体的影像风格。

我们熟悉的过肩正反打、视线匹配等技巧，都是这种风格最重要的武器。

它们会引导我们关注最重要的信息——发言人或是视线的落点等——以此来推动叙事的发展。

但与此同时，它们还保持着一种惊人的透明性（“连贯性风格”之名恰恰来源于此），不会让我们意识到摄影机的存在，也让我们得以彻底浸没在影像中。

但是，存在这些既定的技巧，并不代表古典风格就是一成不变的套路。

就像长镜头风格也能拍出杰作与废品一样，在大师手中，正反打也能展现出极尽细腻的用法——在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中，伊斯特伍德就让我们见识了这一点。

在理查德·朱维尔、他的律师沃森·布莱恩特与两位警官对谈的那场至关重要的戏中，正反打的细腻性体现得淋漓尽致，在这场戏里，朱维尔第一次发自肺腑地对着FBI的警官进行了批判。

很多观众一定觉得这场戏很能调动情绪、很“燃”，但他们很可能没有意识到，伊斯特伍德是通过恰到好处的正反打变体达成这一点的。

因为，这种古典主义的风格图式实在是太“透明”了。

在刚开始的时候，朱维尔、律师和两位警官被分解成两个双人镜头，但它们其实都是“伪双人镜头”。

在朱维尔和律师所处的镜头中，灯光主要关照的是密集地进行发言的朱维尔，而身形较暗、较为沉默的律师处于画面的次要地位；在两位警官的那个镜头中，发言人主要是乔恩·哈姆扮演的、咄咄逼人的汤姆·肖。

所以，这两组双人镜头之间的正反打，其实是朱维尔与肖之间一对一的交锋。

随着这场戏的发展，这一点变得越来越明显。

之所以正反打又名“过肩正反打”，就是因为在A听B说话的时候，我们常常会看到A模糊的肩部，这样我们就能同时体认谈话的双方。

而在这场戏中，当两位警官说话的时候，我们本来能够看到朱维尔和律师的肩部。

但随着谈话的深入，我们就只能看到朱维尔的肩部了——伪双人镜头渐渐变成了真正的单人镜头。

伊斯特伍德微微将镜头右移，同时调整景别，最后我们看到的，是朱维尔与肖的特写正反打。

伊斯特伍德通过这种方式，一方面让我们逐渐关注场景中最重要的焦点，一方面通过越来越近的景别，创造了一种循序渐进的紧张感。

最有趣的是，当朱维尔在特写镜头中慷慨陈词、批判FBI之后，景别旋即变远，我们再次看到了两个松弛的双人镜头——这恰恰是让观众纾解情绪的过程。

在这场迷人的戏中，伊斯特伍德用这种最不易被觉察的、古典主义的手法，发挥了推动叙事进展的指示性效果，也达成了抒发情绪的表现性效果。

在很多时候，即使是那些欧洲艺术电影的风格，也都在发挥着这两种效果。

当然，伊斯特伍德这部技艺精湛的古典之作，不仅仅使用了连贯性剪辑这套武器。

其实，更为久远的好莱坞古典主义电影，是并不排斥较远景别的场面调度的，只不过这种调度也和剪辑一样，会被用来展现透明化的叙事——霍华德·霍克斯正是连贯性调度的大师。

在《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》中，伊斯特伍德通过与剪辑同等细腻的调度，在中远景中展现了奥运会场地、报纸编辑部等一系列的空间，以及这些空间中的群像。

我们看到的不只是朱维尔这个个体，还有一个范围广阔的社群。

正因如此，这种风格也非常适合用来表述这种社会议题。

那种用超近景别构成的电影，其实是晚近好莱坞电影追求感官刺激的策略。

所以，伊斯特伍德的古典性，不仅相对于那些追求电影语汇突破的欧洲电影，也相对于那些当代的好莱坞电影。

看他的电影，我们感受到的不是刺激，而是流畅与舒适，我们真的在聆听一个好好被讲述的故事，真的在思考一个含义深远的历史悖论。

有趣的是，理查德·朱维尔也恰恰是这么一个“古典主义”的个体。

他坚守着那种颇为古典的价值观，无限忠诚地履行着自己的职责，所以他不会“出错”。

在这个万物失格的时代，像朱维尔这样的人早已成为了少数派。

年近九十岁的伊斯特伍德，坚守着这种古典主义风格，或许也正是因为，在向观众传达自己所思所想的时候，他希望自己的影像不要出一点差错。

【本文为木棍电影原创，欢迎关注木棍，点赞转发评论，必能收获好运】克林特·伊斯特伍德，1930年出生，今年5月即将年满90岁。

一般人在这样的年龄，别说拍电影，别说继续工作，可能都卧床不起、老年痴呆了。

但“好莱坞老炮儿”伊斯特伍德老而弥坚地还在自己奋斗终生的电影事业中，以旺盛的创作欲和表达欲，继续策马扬鞭、拓土开疆，而且丝毫不在意别人投来的异样目光。

近几年他执导的《美国狙击手》《萨利机长》《骡子》，每一部都堪称佳作。

老爷子独有的牛仔气质，也被他赋予在电影当中。

你甚至能够想象到，他桀骜的头颅上顶着牛仔帽，红脖、青筋和银发映衬着他犀利愤怒的目光。

中国观众称他为东木，源于他英文名Eastwood的直译。

东木这个名字又不失形象地表现出他又刚又硬的个性和电影风格，就像一块硬邦邦的木头。

在他即将迈进90岁的门槛时，东木老爷子又拍出了这部《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》。

名字如此拗口，第一眼看了甚至不明所以。

可看过之后还是要为东木击节叫好，他再次把电影当做武器，喷出火舌射向他眼中社会的症结与不公。

1、真实事件题材折射出现实的残酷与悲哀东木在2011年执导的历史传记片《胡佛》之后，就开始将视线从历史和虚构的人物，转向到现实中的平民英雄。

而且，他都从真实发生过的故事中提取素材。

《美国狙击手》中的克里斯·凯尔、《萨利机长》中的机长萨伦伯格、《15点17分，启程巴黎》中的三位普通乘客、《骡子》中的东木自己饰演的斯通，都取材自真实事件，人物也都有真实原型。

这部《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》也同样如此。

故事的主人公理查德朱维尔是1996年亚特兰大奥运会期间，担任百年奥林匹克公园日常巡逻执勤任务的一名普通保安。

7月27日，正在举办演唱会的公园里发生了爆炸案，造成2死100余人受伤。

爆炸发生之前，理查德率先发现了可疑包裹，并第一时间提醒满不在乎的同事报警，待确认了炸弹之后开始和其他安保、警察疏散人群。

他的举动显然减少了爆炸发生后造成的伤亡人数，一下子成了国家英雄。

可仅仅3天后，理查德却被亚特兰大当地报纸《亚特兰大宪法报》报道为FBI的头号嫌疑人。

理查德从英雄到嫌犯的转变，是源于FBI基于“犯罪侧写”对理查德的怀疑。

很多犯罪事件中的案犯，往往是第一个报警、第一个到达案发现场的人。

个中缘由是这样的案犯有着扭曲的心理，他们通常生活中郁郁寡欢不得志，不被人理解和重视，或者幻想成为英雄人物，就会自己犯下罪行，再第一时间出来指认或充当英雄，以获得受到认同的满足感。

理查德恰恰十分符合这种犯罪侧写出来的画像：身处社会底层的白人肥胖男性，大龄未婚跟母亲住在一起，曾经当过警察却因过度执法被开除，把当一名好警察当人生理想，家中还藏有大量枪支甚至手雷。

于是，FBI的官员在没有任何确凿证据的情况下，试图通过诱导、监视、控制等手段给理查德定罪。

虽然最后理查德在律师的帮助下洗脱了不白之冤，可他本人和他母亲内心受到的伤害却也不可挽回。

理查德在事件发生11年后因心脏衰竭去世，年仅44岁。

另一方面，以《亚特兰大宪法报》为代表的媒体在事件中也扮演着并不光彩的角色。

女记者利用色诱从FBI探员口中得到理查德成为嫌疑人的消息，在真相未明的情况下便公之于众，引得舆论迅速转向。

大小媒体的记者们也跟FBI的探员们一起，将理查德和他母亲的家堵得水泄不通。

所谓“哀歌”，正是理查德所经历的这一切，让我们通过电影这些了解到真相的观众所能感受到的难以言说的悲哀。

是什么样的力量，让这样一个平民英雄蒙受冤屈？

又是谁，应该为这样的悲剧负责？

东木把这个真实故事搬上银幕，将矛头直指官僚与公权力，以及媒体权力的滥用。

其背后，是官员与记者先入为主的刻板印象，对他人的傲慢与偏见，固执己见的作风这些人性之暗。

从这个角度讲，《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》与东木导演的另一部作品《萨利机长》有异曲同工之妙，主人公都是拯救了百人的英雄，却被迫陷入与质疑他们的官僚主义者孤军奋战的斗争。

2、古典主义拍摄手法下的戏剧张力与《萨利机长》不同的是，《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》并没有采取插叙闪回的叙事手法，而是用最古典的拍摄方式，平铺直叙地线性推进故事的展开。

古典主义是介于现实主义和形式主义的电影风格，是以连贯性剪辑技法为主体的影像风格。

这样的技法相对明确，又不失故事性和戏剧性，叙事清晰，因果明确，视听讲究，场景考究。

现实主义和形式主义的两端，即是纪录片和先锋电影。

而剧情片大抵都可归为古典主义范畴，只不过侧重的方向和程度不同。

显然，东木老爷子近几年从真实事件中取材的方式，让他的电影风格更偏向于现实主义，或者说是更加纯粹的古典主义。

《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》更为明显。

影片前30分钟，通过对理查德在当上奥运会保安之前很多年的经历描述、对白处理，交代了这个人物的背景和性格特征，为后续爆炸案的发生及此后他的遭遇及反应，做了言简意赅又充分的铺垫。

之后对整个爆炸事件的描写，蒙冤与反抗的故事推进，都在东木冷静隐忍的镜头里徐徐展开，画面色调也是一如既往的冷清。

电影更像真实事件的再现，无需刻意煽情，由观众自己去体会感受角色身处的境遇。

这样的手法，让电影透着一股真实肃穆之感，也增加了理查德所陷困境的沉重之感。

影片高潮处，理查德和律师与FBI对峙的那场戏，导演用简单的人物正反打凸显出角色的张力和情节的反转。

一开始的镜头，是两个阵营分别的双人镜头，随着交锋的进行，特写镜头集中在理查德和FBI的汤姆肖身上，从阵营的对峙到一对一的交锋，创造了循序渐进的紧张感。

演员们精湛的表演为影片添色不少。

理查德的饰演者保罗·沃尔特·豪泽在形象上简直与原型人物神似。

他很好的把握了这个角色身上长期被人歧视而缺乏自信，又对自己人生目标执着，对他人甚至官员充满善意的特点。

影片中理查德的眼神一直很游离，他不太敢正视周遭的陌生人，包括警察、探员和记者，甚至对母亲和帮助他的律师目光也总是闪躲。

但最后那场与FBI的对峙戏，他终于能目光如炬的盯着对面的汤姆肖，充分说明了他心态上的巨大转变，那是一种曾有的理想信念坍塌后，对公权认知的转变，对官僚作风的反抗。

山姆·洛克威尔饰演理查德的律师沃森·布莱恩特，这位凭《三块广告牌》拿下奥斯卡最佳男配角的演技派，在本片中将沃森的正直、友善，以及面对总是不听话的理查德和蛮横无理的FBI官员时的无奈都很好的诠释了出来。

给人印象最深的是饰演理查德母亲的凯西·贝茨，她在片中是情绪变化最剧烈的角色，那场记者发布会上的演讲表现出来的紧张、悲痛、委屈简直是教科书级别的，不愧为当年凭《危情十日》拿下奥斯卡和金球奖的双料影后。

她凭借本片也获得本届奥斯卡最佳女配的提名。

3、意识形态和政治倾向的作者表达对于美国老右派代表的伊斯特伍德来说，他的电影一直都毫无顾忌地输出着他自己的政治倾向。

尽管《理查德·朱维尔的哀歌》的拍摄手法相当冷静，但其中太容易看出东木所要表达的政治观点。

在美国，左翼政党是民主党，他们宣扬服务广大民众，主张平权；右翼政党是共和党，则遵循保守主义，政治主张偏向中产阶级、精英阶层。

对伊斯特伍德来说，惩恶扬善、开拓进取、个人主义、经验主义、家庭秩序、男性至上、职业伦理，都是他认为的人身在世最重要的价值观。

他对自己所信奉的这套价值观、人生法则、处世态度没有丝毫怀疑，并且在作品中用更为坚定的姿态斩钉截铁的宣扬出来，向世人一次次袒露心迹。

在好莱坞越来越左倾的情况下，只有年近90岁的东木老爷子还如此倔强。

身为共和党党员，东木老爷子就曾经对着椅子上“看不见的奥巴马”吐槽了十几分钟。

保守派基于基督教义有着善良和正直的价值取向。

理查德就是典型的右派好人形象。

影片一开始的交待中，理查德是一个最普通的人，为人生活保守甚至形象欠佳，但谦逊单纯，职业理想是惩恶扬善，以保护他人为己任，午休时间在游戏机上展示了天赋异禀的枪法。

这让他在后来成为他律师的沃森心中留下深刻而良好的印象。

有一个细节也很能体现理查德的善良，他在公园执勤看到孕妇，就把自己作为安保人员配发的瓶装水送个了孕妇。

在被FBI开始调查时，律师沃森让他少说话，他却站在政府的角度分析和配合。

母亲的保鲜盒被拿走，他说那可以用来装炸药；官员让他模仿恐怖分子打电话，他就配合着说了好几次。

而知识分子、媒体和FBI则是左派作风。

理查德在大学当保安却闯进学生宿舍过度执法引起投诉而被校长开除，正是这个校长在之后爆炸案发生后仅凭自己的主观印象就向警方举报了理查德。

女记者为了报纸头条和销量，向FBI探员汤姆肖进行性贿赂获取独家消息。

政府在无证据情况下强行调查，导致理查德和他母亲尊严和隐私遭到肆意践踏。

媒体代表的社会监督，和政府官员代表的公权执法，在右派眼中是一种虚假丑恶的民主。

相反，右派需要维护真相，坚守尊严。

于是，伊斯特伍德在电影中借沃森之口告诉理查德，那几位FBI官员不能代表政府，他们只是为政府打工的蠢蛋。

借理查德母亲之口，在记者发布会时斥责了公权的傲慢无理，展现了他们所遭受的伤害和误解。

其实，理查德是不是凶手，一个简单的从案发现场到电话亭的计时测试就能搞清楚。

后来伊斯特伍德在影片中让奥利维亚·王尔德饰演的那位女记者，在理查德的发布上留下悔恨的泪水，算是为媒体找回的一丝尊严和慰藉。

东木老爷子就是这么越老越刚，他坚守着自己的右派价值观，为这个问题重重的社会发出不一样的声音。

电影里理查德说：如果像我这样的人蒙受冤屈被捕了，以后再遇到类似的情况，还会有人挺身而出吗？

原创：木棍编辑：木棍公众号：木棍先生