Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell will be released in December and many people are questioning the timing, not only of its release, but of its general making. The story – about an ordinary man railroaded by the press into becoming a national joke – doesn’t exactly portray the mainstream media in the best light. With President Trump, and Republicans in general, regularly condemning the media as biased and craven, some have criticized Eastwood’s decision to make a film that would appear to give credence to that claim. They accuse the conservative Eastwood of making and releasing this film with a political agenda.
The best movies are those that would seem to somehow change a little bit with each viewing. Of course, we know that the films themselves haven’t changed at all. It’s the viewer. It’s us. We change over time, through new experiences, fresh insights, and engaging relationships, until the person watching a film for the fifth or sixth time could almost be considered completely different from the one that watched it the first.
At this point in my life, I’ve probably watched Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane around twenty times. It was hovering around ten, but then I became a film teacher, and the number skyrocketed. And the number will continue growing with each passing semester. My first time watching the film was as a teenager. I’d heard the film was great, but that didn’t begin to prepare me for the moral and artistic complexities contained in Welles’ masterpiece. After all these years of not merely watching the film, but studying both it and its creator, you’d think that the film had finally taught me everything that it was going to.
