J. Edgar
DIRECTED BY CLINT EASTWOOD
In order to ensure the positive portrayal of his beloved bureau in Warner Bros.’ 1959 film, The FBI Story, J. Edgar Hoover was famously brought on board as production consultant and is said to have demanded personal approval of every frame. Evidently, no such shackles were placed on J. Edgar, Warner’s latest FBI-centric release, directed by Clint Eastwood and penned by Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black. Hoover’s rumoured homosexuality was wrathfully denied by the man himself, but Black’s screenplay takes it as fact and suggests Hoover’s repressed desires contributed to a career premised on a near-pathological suspicion of non-conformists and a deep-seated insecurity, masked by an aggressive megalomania.
In particular, Hoover’s repressed desire for his protégé, Clyde Tolson, is the film’s focus, alongside the inception of the FBI and its development into a forensics-based crime-fighting entity with an ill-concealed contempt for civil liberties. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hoover, as both the ambitious young man who would become the FBI’s founding director and as his despotic late-life counterpart, wearing jowly, Jon Voight-esque prosthetics. Tolson is played by Armie Hammer, alternately as the fresh-faced law grad who first tickles Hoover’s fancy and as Hoover’s late-life secret soulmate, wearing liver-spotted, corpse-like prosthetics. Also corpse-like is Judi Dench (prosthetic assistance uncertain) as Hoover’s domineering mother, who, upon his confession that he doesn’t like to “dance” with women, offers the traumatic retort that she’d rather her son were dead than a “daffodil.” DiCaprio’s conflicted turn will do his Oscar chances no harm, even if, strictly physically, his portrayal requires a significant suspension of disbelief.
Perhaps inevitably, J. Edgar‘s main shortcoming is the superficiality with which it’s forced to address much of its subject matter, a consequence of condensing a hugely controversial 48-year tenure into 137 minutes of screen time. Hoover’s obsessive hatred of Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, is touched on—apparently King’s adultery was of greater concern than JFK’s assassination—but hardly explored. It’s a common biopic problem, exacerbated by a subject for whom a full accounting would require a franchise, rather than a film. Wisely, Black and Eastwood chiefly conceive J. Edgar as an intimate character study, rather than an attempt to comprehensively survey Hoover’s merits and extensive misdeeds. What emerges is a figure mired in denial and self-deception, capable of monstrous acts but certainly human.