Friday, November 11, 2011 at 10:18AM Movie Review: 'J. Edgar'
| J. Edgar
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Judi Dench
|
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.
