Nordling here.
Clint Eastwood’s J. EDGAR is a frustrating misfire. It’s frustrating because it has good intentions, and there are moments that work, but you can feel Eastwood running hot and cold on the material. When the film deals with the beginnings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all the politics that surrounded J. Edgar Hoover’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) rise to power, the film is on. When it deals with the personal life and relationships that Edgar has with his mother Annie (Judi Dench) and with his partner Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), it struggles to find a pace and a voice.
Another issue is that J. EDGAR seems to shy away from the personal controversies of Hoover’s life. Was J. Edgar gay, or simply so devoted to his work that relationships simply were not a part of his life? What were his passions other than the Bureau? And what exactly was his relationship to Clyde Tolson – were they good friends and work associates, or lovers? The film skirts around it, except for a few scenes, and the end. Eastwood seems to want to hit the levels or poignancy and tragedy that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN reached, but that film was never frightened of the subject matter the way that J. EDGAR seems to be.
J. EDGAR’s narrative device is that the story is being told by Edgar to agents assigned to help write his memoirs. The film leaps backwards and forwards in time, and Dustin Lance Black’s script never stays very long on one time in particular. It makes sense in the context of the film, and we realize that we are seeing events through his prism, and what really happened may not exactly gel with how Edgar perceives them to have happened. It’s an interesting take on the biopic, but Eastwood doesn’t run with that concept as well as he should. The cinematography is strange as well – the colors are muted and dull, which may have been an artistic choice but kept me questioning whether or not the projection was bad. It’s almost as J. EDGAR couldn’t decide if it wanted to be in black and white or not.
The film’s timeline ranges from Hoover in his 20s, working with the Attorney General in trying to root out Communist terrorist groups, to the end of his career under Richard Nixon. The film devotes much of its time to the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s (Josh Lucas) baby, which through Congressional acts gave the Bureau much of its power. At first, Hoover thinks to have a normal life with his secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), but after she turns down his proposal of marriage Hoover devotes all his time to the Bureau of Investigations. The film glosses over such events as the Dillinger shooting, the Bureau’s pursuit of the mob, and the attempted blackmail by Hoover of Martin Luther King, Jr., always telling it from Hoover’s point-of-view, and as the film goes on it becomes evident that his idea about himself and the historical view of J. Edgar Hoover’s life are quite different.
But probably the deepest problem of the film is that too much of it is unintentionally funny, almost approaching camp. The makeup work on Armie Hammer is ridiculously bad. He’s trying very hard to overcome it, but when he plays Tolson as an old man, that makeup job is too distracting to take seriously. It’s truly unfortunate because Hammer does good work here, even while being undermined by the makeup work. DiCaprio fares better with his old age makeup, but at times it felt as if I was watching a Philip Seymour Hoffman impersonation. DiCaprio does very good work as well; his conflicted nature comes through in the performance even when the writing doesn’t seem to show it. He manages to make the audience feel sympathy, but not enough for a man who admittedly spent much of his career snooping through other people’s closets to deflect from his own. But the scenes of Tolson and Hoover together, especially a scene in a hotel room where Tolson shows his true feelings, play up the sexuality of the characters and Eastwood is on less steady ground. The moments where Hoover shows affection towards Colson are fleeting and Eastwood seems almost embarrassed to go there.
It’s clear that J. Edgar Hoover was a complicated man with complicated motives, and while the personal aspects of Hoover’s life are conjecture in the film, J. EDGAR isn’t quite brave enough to look underneath. Judi Dench is also quite good as the mother who knows just the right things to say to Edgar to motivate him; she manipulates him as well, and in one scene where she explains to Edgar, when he almost comes clean about his sexuality to her, her viewpoint on the matter is particularly cold and well done. “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son,” she tells him, and that affects every reaction he has to other men, even when it’s obvious that in the film he’s in love with Clyde Tolson.
J. EDGAR is long and feels it – at times it feels like it’s going over the same ground again and again. I’m not sure if an austere, measured look at this particular life was the way to go here – J. EDGAR could have used a little more sordid sleaze and less a clinical distance. After all, the real J. Edgar Hoover knew the secrets of practically everyone who had a name for themselves in the United States at the time, but the movie seems to insist that he did this because he felt he was a patriot instead of a man wallowing in gossip and tawdriness. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but J. EDGAR never really lets us in there to decide that for ourselves.
Nordling, out.
