J. Edgar

J. Edgar tells the story of the man and his agency. J. Edgar Hoover for better or worse shaped the history of the last century as few others have. He was a pioneer in the field of law enforcement a reformer who made the Federal Bureau of Investigation free from political corruption, gave it modern crime fighting methods, and near deity status among the masses. I've always maintained that had Hoover just retired at the end of World War II his historical reputation would be much higher today. But as he points out in this film no one shares power in Washington, DC and few ever give it up willingly.

All this and at the same time being a frightened man, way deep in his closet's closet as a gay man. Most gay folk will tell you now even in this post Stonewall age the hardest part of coming out is to family. In Hoover's case it was his mother played here by Judy Dench who was an imperious Southern bred lady who tells Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover that above all she does not want to have a 'daffodil' for a son. The gay in him is pretty much repressed until he meets Clyde Tolson who becomes Deputy Director and Hoover's silent partner for decades.

In real life Tolson who is played here by Armie Hammer was something of a stabilizing influence on the real Hoover, many times talking to him or even subtly countermanding moves that would be public relations disasters for the image conscious Hoover. In his life few knew of his role in the agency and fewer in Hoover's personal life.

The other key player in Hoover's life is Naomi Watts as personal secretary Helen Gandy who was that for almost his entire time with the FBI. He tries clumsily to get a romance going, but settles for her just being the woman who kept the secrets for the man who held all the nation's secrets.

Director Clint Eastwood who will make fewer and fewer appearances in front of the camera at his age gets some great performances from his cast in a story that takes up the middle of the American 20th Century. Leonardo DiCaprio is so good you absolutely think you are looking at Hoover himself. Helping in that is one of the greatest body and facial makeup jobs the cinema has ever witnessed.

Henry Kissinger once said of Richard Nixon that he was a brilliant man who might have not fallen or even done the things he did good and bad if he ever felt loved. That could easily have been J. Edgar's story as well. One wonders also if Hoover had been born three or for generations later to see the Stonewall Rebellion in his youth how that might have shaped him as well.

J. Edgar is one remarkable film from the remarkable team of Eastwood and DiCaprio.

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.

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 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.

It doesn't take an American history buff to be familiar with a figure such as J. Edgar Hoover, founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation... and a little more on the political chessboard. Anyone who've watched enough political movies would know a little about that rotund man who seemed to oscillate between the good and the bad side depending on protagonists and circumstances. Played by Kevin Dunn, he was the man behind the long exile in Richard Attenborough's biopic "Chaplin", Bob Hoskins played him as a conflicted string-puller who posed as an ally to "Nixon" not without reluctance... and his long-time relationship with Clyde Tolston wasn't cut out. In "Mississippi Burning" he was almost the 'Big Good' as the FBI agents were dismissed as Hoover boys by the local racists... finally, if you're a fan of Looney Tunes' cartoon, you might recall his cameo in "Hollywood Steps Out".

J. Edgar Hoover was one of these historical figures so larger-than-life history had no choice but "invent" them; his career spanned more than four decades and covered every major sequence of the 20th century: the rise of anarchist movements after the Great War, gangsterism during the Prohibition, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the ensuing 'Trial of the Century', the Kennedy presidency and his rivalry with the little brother Bobby and Nixon... perhaps the one adversary he wouldn't have the luxury to witness the downfall. You can't write America's history without having a few alineas linking back to Hoover, the man who created the FBI, revolutionized the method investigations, pioneering forensic and the classification of fingerprints at a time they were deemed as speculative science. And yet for some reason, he was always relegated to a secondary even tertiary level, there's no film about him as the leading role and maybe that says a lot about the paradox of the man, so present and yet absent, using secrecy as a sword and as a shield.

Making a film about Hoover was the challenge raised by Clint Eastwood and it wasn't an easy task. Through a rather well-structured albeit austere script, he manages to paint a rather interesting portrayal of a complex man, one who insisted to make America as secure as ever, driven by a fear of anarchy, yet driven by his own insecurities; who insisted that every recruit should be irreproachable and yet lived as a bachelor officially married to his job... but officiously living with the same man for more than forty years. Not the least of his paradox is that he wanted to offer the real alternative to the then popular gangster figure while he was like his enemies, a momma's boy who had too much to prove, a gangster on the right side of the law. Hoover had his secrets, like everyone else. Yes, it is highly plausible that Martin Luther King wasn't a saint, nor was Gandhi and that any good man had secrets that could potentially ruin their legacy, let alone not-so good men.

The script from Dustin Lance Black takes us back between the present where Hoover dictates his memoir to the various events that shaped his convictions. We see the evolution of the man from a bigoted Conservative to a patriotic enforcer, at times he's playing the bad role, at others, he's indeed a superhero going into a legitimate crusade against crime his finest hour being his role in the Lindbergh case, its resolution... and resolutions. Whether he's the unreliable narrator of his deeds (he exaggerated a little) or if he was driven by ego is besides the point, he orchestrated the Baby kidnapping investigation like a badass hero. I doubt Eastwood would hold Hoover in high esteem but he'd just reveal the layers without trying to force us to take a firm stance and that's all to his credit, he makes his Hoover controversial enough not to make his film an act of rehabilitation but develops so many intimate scenes that we can at least makes hints of connections.

On that level, the scenes between him and his mother and moral conscience provides a few hints and the botched romance with Mrs. Gandy his secretary might look like the catalysis of a life of so-called secrecy. Judi Dench and Naomi Watts are effective as the two women behind the (great?) man. Now ,the real challenge was to turn Leo into a convincing Hoover, his handsomeness is somewhat a drawback because it's hard to believe this dashing young man would be so awkward with the ladies, the performance was excellent and he's strangely more convincing as an old man but sometimes he's just too looking to let his image overshadows our vision of Hoover who wasn't exactly a handsome playboy. As a matter of fact, Kevin James would have made a more convincing Hoover. Arnie Hammer is also remarkable as the one man behind the man and their chemistry provides the same kind of behind-the-scene intimacy that reminded me of Joan Allen's performance as Pat Nixon.

The trick is to make the whole movie engaging and on that level too, the film is a semi-success, there's a feeling of strange emptiness when the film concludes, Eastwood embraced the man's shadow so much he made his film rather moody and depressing. I was just watching "The Untouchables" and I regretted that Eastwood had to make his Hoover in such a somber and gloomy mood. More was needed but as far as the portrayal of the man is concerned, the film does a good job to the degree it gives you the general idea about Hoover, whether twisted, misunderstood or legitimate, the man had ideals and abhorred ideologies... an attachment to security and so many insecurities, a living paradox that called for a more lively film.

Maybe Eastwood didn't relate much to his own protagonist and so the heart wasn't in it, maybe this is the kind of material more suitable for a director like Oliver Stone, who knows... the film is a good biopic but not in Eastwood's Top 10 Best... or Leo's for that matter.