J. Edgar

Clint Eastwood's boldness and creativity paid off in this excellent portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover's life. A project like that is not pulled off by just anyone, and the fact that a film like that was even made shows the importance of Clint Eastwood. His direction was marvelous, by the way, showing without fear the dark side of the FBI director, but also showing all the good aspects of this very interesting subject. Leonardo DiCaprio is another great reason to watch the film, in one of the most moving performances in his career. His portrayal of a Hoover both ruthless and emotionally vulnerable was superb, and he has excelled once again in studying the character. The make up must also be praised for allowing DiCaprio to portrayal Hoover in many different stages of his life. J. Edgar, if not Clint's best work, is a very interesting and moving film, and the fact that it is so under-appreciated is a mystery to me.

Any movie Clint Eastwood makes is certainly worth a look, and Leonardo DiCaprio is entertaining in anything he does. But this version of J. Edgar Hoover's story seems superficial, and lacking meat on its bones.

That has more to do with its form – a theatrical film only two hours and 17 minutes long - relative to the length of the biography at its core. Hoover was such a complex man, and his career was so long, with so many chapters, that his story is probably better suited to a 4-to 6 hour HBO mini-series, where more of the details of his life, that this film with its short running time can only hint at, can be more completely told.

Dustin Lance Black, who wrote this film's screenplay (as well as that of Milk), is walking a very fine line here regarding Hoover's complex personality; it seems that he had a much more intricate story he wanted to tell, were it not for the confines of the feature film format. Here, broad brush strokes take the place of long chapters on Hoover's involvement with the Red Scares of the '20's and '50's, political blackmail, gambling, organized crime, and of course, homosexuality.

But if it had been made as a mini-series, it probably wouldn't have attracted Eastwood and DiCaprio, and consequently wouldn't have the high profile that this film does. That version of his story will have to wait for another time.

Eastwood chose to shoot this story in a washed-out color palette. The story jumps back in forth in time, and the closer the events of the film are to the end of Hoover's life, the more color Eastwood imbues into the scenes; the earliest moments in the time line are shown in a color scheme barely above monochrome. It's a subtle effect, but it helps the viewer keep track of where the scenes exist in Hoover's life.

That long time line necessitates that DiCaprio must be seen in various makeup schemes to convey the age of his character at any point in the story. His makeup is uniformly good; but the two other principal actors in the film, Armie Hammer as Hoover's longtime companion Clyde Tolson, and Naomi Watts as Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy, don't fare so well as their characters age. Obviously, the lion's share of the film's makeup budget was allotted to the star. Hammer, it must be said, gives a fine performance under all those old-age prosthetics. Christopher Shyer, who plays Richard Nixon in a brief scene, has the least-effective verisimilitude of anyone who has played the man in a motion picture.

But makeup alone does not a performance make. Di Caprio's ability to remain in character and "age" with him is remarkable, and transcends the work of his makeup artist. As he did with his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator, his skillful use of voice and body to stay true to his characterization of Hoover through the years is evident throughout.

One gets the feeling that much of this film was shot in front of a green screen, no surprise given the various eras of Washington that it depicts; but to a longtime moviegoer, there's a certain sadness that imparts to seeing that technique, once the province of the large-scale action film, used in serious dramas. There was probably no other way to do it in this day and age, but it just calls attention to itself in a way that gets in the way of one's immersion into the subject matter. Admittedly, that's my problem, not the film's.

So, is it worth a look? Sure. Best Picture nominee? In a field of ten, probably. Will Leo finally win an Oscar this time out? Well, look at it this way: Paul Newman gave his best performance in The Verdict, but the Academy finally honored him for The Color of Money. Leo probably should have won for playing Howard Hughes, but maybe he'll win for playing J. Edgar.

The best that can be said for this film is that it got made. The subject matter, about the life of a dreadfully dull and stodgy old bureaucrat from a bygone era, is not in line with Hollywood's usual mass-produced action films aimed at brash young boys. I credit Director Eastwood and lead actor Leonardo Di Caprio with enough star power to convince the money-men to fund this project. And it turned a profit.

But there are plenty of problems with "J. Edgar", not the least of which is a script that flips back and forth too much between the 1960s and earlier decades in Hoover's life. A lot of time is wasted on the gangster era of the 1920 and 30s, possibly because Di Caprio is so youthful looking, he fits a younger image of Hoover, in contrast to an aging old man in the 60s. Almost nothing is included about the JFK assassination and follow-up investigation despite the fact that Hoover played a central role in marketing the "lone-gunman" theory.

Throughout, Hoover comes across as bureaucratic, rigid, moralistic, self-righteous, incapable of changing with the times, dishonest, and a hypocrite. Absent from the film are any virtuous qualities he may have had.

As Hoover, Leonardo Di Caprio gives a better performance than I would have predicted. But the script does Di Caprio no favors. The dialogue for Hoover consists largely of platitudes and pronouncements. Hoover doesn't talk with people so much as make little speeches to them. And Di Caprio's monotone voice exaggerates this talking down to others effect.

Hoover demanded loyalty from his staff. As his private secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) is an interesting study in forced loyalty. Ditto Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), as Hoover's sidekick.

Cinematography is quite dark. Colors are heavily muted, almost monochromatic. Costumes and prod design are convincing across five decades. But makeup for an older Clyde Tolson is horrid; his face looks like a wax figure that's about to melt.

"J. Edgar" could have been much better, had the script focused more on the sixties and shown Hoover's working relationship to the Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson. And though I appreciate Di Caprio's efforts to get the film made, a different actor might have been more convincing in the role of Hoover. Still, the film is a reasonably good effort. It's worth watching once, if for no other reason than because it's a true story about a real-life historical figure.

It can happen to the best of us. Spielberg, Scorsese, Hitchcock, and even Clint Eastwood himself are capable of making an instantly-dismissible picture. Sometimes, it seems, a director will find himself in a project without much of a passion for it and looking at the final product, it's kind of hard to see his signature on the screen. That is the case with Mr. Eastwood's biopic on the life of J. Edgar Hoover. The movie, "J. Edgar", is everything I did not expect from Mr. Eastwood considering the deep, thought-provocative and artistic power of his last movie "Hereafter" as well as the many films that he made beforehand. Slow, pretentious, and middling.

Many actors have played the infamous FBI founder over the years (once by Hoover himself, in the 1959 James Stewart movie "The FBI Story"). This time, the role goes to Leonardo DiCaprio. Unfortunately, it seems, his feelings about the movie seemed to be identical to Mr. Eastwood's, as he merely ham-acts throughout the entirety of the movie. The only thing differentiating his performance from scene-to-scene depends on how much phony make-up has been slapped on his face. It's sort of like a "Citizen Kane" portrait of a real-life figure, starting around the time of the man's death and whisking back and forth between the past and the present. Except whereas that great Orson Welles film from seventy years ago did it with precision and aesthetic greatness, the narrative of "J. Edgar" takes such vast leaps that it frequently falls flat on its face.

The screenplay was written by Dustin Lance Black, who won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for "Milk." Once again, he more or less writes this story more as a vessel for a homosexual romance and rights message. And it is here that he strikes his intended gold. Hoover's lover, his right-hand man Clyde Tolson, is played with immense passion by Armie Hammer. And it is the scenes between Mr. Hammer and Mr. DiCaprio that work. A particularly great scene involves the two secret lovers sharing a dinner table with some flirtatious Hollywood starlets and nervously trying to shake off the ladies' sexual advances without giving themselves away. Also fascinating and frightful is a confrontation about homosexuality between Mr. DiCaprio and Judi Dench as Hoover's mother.

So it is in this soulful subplot that Mr. Black's screenplay works, but when he tries to form a narrative arc about the lifetime of J. Edgar Hoover and bounce across decades in a coherent manner, it starts to struggle. Furthermore, apart from the love subplot, there is no chemistry between the characters. Naomi Watts, as Hoover's secretary, is given such insignificant things to do that she may as well have been an extra.

Earlier I mentioned that a passionless project even by a great director, will appear to lose its creators' signature and that is no more evident than in here. Mr. Eastwood's directing, though hardly bad, is rather dull with too many long shots and ponderous slow zooms. And while Leonardo DiCaprio was an inspired choice to play J. Edgar Hoover, he does it almost playfully, without much soul or conviction. Most embarrassing of all is the forced accent with which he enunciates the dialogue. Capped with some truly horrific make-up, when playing the elderly Hoover, the actor appears to be giving a comic stand-up performance at a nightclub. Reputedly, Mr. DiCaprio spent five hours every morning having the prosthetics applied to his face when playing the older version of the character. All I can say is that they should have spent at least six, for the make-up looks like exactly what it is. And the stuff put on Mr. Hammer for his old-guy moments makes him look like he belongs in a 30s Universal horror film.

Just as frightful as the makeup is the hack-job cinematography by Tom Stern. Yes, the same Tom Stern who has lit beautiful images for many of Clint Eastwood's earlier films, including "Changeling" for which he deservedly earned an Academy Award nomination. Mr. Stern's specialty seems to be in low-key lighting. Last year, he did a fabulous job catching the mood of "Hereafter" with clever use of shadows and silhouetting lights. But here, he goes overboard. The shadows in "J. Edgar" are so amateurish and monstrous that (I kid you not) the actors sometime disappear in them. If there is a symbolic purpose behind this, I cannot think of it. And other times, the lights are too soft. Close-ups of characters make them appear to be covered with flour and worst of all is when the camera tracks into a dark room and auto-adjusts to the new light...much like a home-video camera.

I never imagined I would see a Clint Eastwood film where I would look at my watch impatiently before the first hour was even up, but alas the day has come. "J. Edgar" is a dimwitted, passionless project that brings almost nothing to our previous knowledge about the formation of the FBI and the men who made it all possible. Only a couple of sharp, provocative moments from Dustin Lance Black's screenplay really stand out. Now Clint Eastwood has made five or six masterpieces during his forty-year career as a director and about twice as many great films, so despite my disappointment, I am prepared to allow this one to fade from my memory.

Not that that would be very hard. If J. Edgar Hoover had a file cabinet labeled 'Instantly Forgettable,' that is where this film would have gone.

The infamous words spoken by Pilate to Jesus of Nazareth come to mind when one ponders the life of John Edgar Hoover. Was he a genius or a tyrant? A patriot or a dictator? A cross dresser or an uptight man with no sex life? Nobody knows for certain, and director Clint Eastwood does not offer a definitive answer to any of these questions, which is exactly as it should be. Life is rarely cut-and-dried, but moviegoers seem to have forgotten that fact in the face of media that state speculation as fact on a regular basis.

I find it not only surprising, but distressing, that a major criticism from those critics who panned the film is the lack of closure on Hoover's private life. Unless they are truly obtuse, they must realize that no film could possibly do such a thing, since his files were destroyed at his own bidding. All is speculation, and a fine speculation it is. Leonardo DiCaprio is superb (as usual) in the title role, never revealing more cards then he chooses to at any given moment. He receives fine support from Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson, Hoover's Second in Command/Rumored Lover, and Naomi Watts as his endlessly loyal private secretary Helen Gandy. At a time when "red fever" ran high, Hoover's relentlessly tightening control on government investigations is shown in flashbacks that only underscore how supreme power can corrupt even the noblest of intentions.

In the end, the film answers none of the questions that seem so important to the very critics that disliked it, but in my humble opinion, a well made film is one that inspires debate or discussion rather than simply hand down a definitive 'this is the way it was' with an imperious gavel. With "J Edgar", Eastwood and his cast have succeeded well.