Movie Review: 'J. Edgar'

J. Edgar Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Judi Dench Directed by Clint Eastwood Rated R

When a film is based off of a real person, it risks falling into one of two different pitfalls.  On one hand, it can oversimplify somebody’s life just to cram it into a two hour narrative.  On the other, it can bog down the story with too many details and sub plots, all in an attempt to make the main character to three-dimensional as he was in real life.  J. Edgar falls squarely in line with the latter.

The film begins with a conversation between J. Edgar Hoover, the widely hated founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and the first of many FBI lackeys he has assigned to write his biography.  He wants to tell his side of the story, a side that will keep everything he did in context.  He tells us quite a bit.  We learn about Hoover the paranoid anti-Communist warrior, Hoover the illegal spy, Hoover the sheltered and dedicated son, Hoover the repressed homosexual, Hoover the cross-dresser, and many other Hoovers.  They are all quite interesting in their own right, but as soon as it seems one is going to develop, we are shifted away in a different direction by a script that never figures out how to make the narrative flow.  There isn’t much of a main plot, just a long series of subplots.

The story is at its best when we get to see him in action as an investigator.  The film shows us his origins as an ambitious agent who starts out in a disorganized agency so lethargic it rolls its eyes at the prospect of using newfangled “finger print” technology.  Yet, he is able to turn it into a federally powered institution capable of illegally wire-tapping Martin Luther King Jr. and getting away with it.  He’s dedicated to his work, and always has an excuse to extend his governmentally sanctioned grip just a little bit farther.  

The script succeeds in keeping him likeable during all of this, as he doesn’t want any of this power for its own sake.  Rather, it’s all just a part of his never-ending war against the socialist forces that seem to control every other country but America.  If he knows anything, it’s that a full-scale Communist invasion is always waiting around the corner, he’s the only one who can stop it, and knowing who Eleanor Roosevelt is having a lesbian affair with is somehow a means to stopping it.  He has a messiah complex and an Internet troll personality.  It's hard not to like someone so passionately buried in their own little world and it’s fascinating to see just how far he’s willing to take it.

Leonardo DiCaprio gives a solid performance that helps overcome many of the script's problems, injecting his character with some much-needed cohesion.  Nonetheless, his fine acting is often sabotaged by the film’s poor flow.  We never get to deeply explore his relationship with his domineering mother (Judi Dench) other than to know that, well, she was a domineering mother.  Likewise, when the subject of Hoover’s cross-dressing tendencies comes up, its so poorly led up to that it just comes off as hysterically surreal instead of serious.  Had these plots been shortened, the film would have felt far less meandering. Had they been bulked up, it would have been more emotionally moving.  As they are, they just waste valuable screentime.

 

The other actors do well with what they're given.  Armie Hammer does a fine job playing Clyde Tolson, the uncomfortably clean-cut agent with whom Hoover forms a close (and partially homosexual) relationship with. Naomi Watts plays Helen Gady, Hoover’s life-long secretary and seemingly the only person he never suspects of treason.

J. Edgar is a decent film that had the potential to be great.  It’s not often that I suggest a movie be made longer, but if it just had another twenty or thirty more minutes to develop its titular character, it could have been the Oscar contender that director Clint Eastwood is no doubt hoping it to be.

Comments

[Arthur Taper]

I agree on the limitation of films to encapsulate a true-to-life story. I think a common problem these kinds of film has is that the producers and director try to summarize everything into a single movie. It is impossible to create a storyline that will show all important details - what they can do is focus on a certain part on the life of the main character. The other facts have to be set aside to gain focus on another; otherwise, the whole movie will be a blur.

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