J. EDGAR

Federal Follies

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Josh Lucas

It’s pretty much taken for granted these days that Clint Eastwood is a master filmmaker, and it’s hard to argue against such works as Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Having said that, it’s worth remembering that not every Eastwood production is a masterpiece; the man’s body of work also contains such duds as Firefox, Blood Work and Hereafter, and while it’s not a complete write-off, his latest effort has more in common with those mediocre misfires than the aforementioned masterworks.
On paper it looks like a sure thing: a biopic of the fascinating and conflicted founder of the F.B.I., with DiCaprio in the title role and a screenplay by Oscar-winning writer of Milk, Dustin Lance Black, delivered with Eastwood’s usual subtlety and control. The actual result is a shapeless and meandering film that touches on most of the key elements of Hoover’s life without illuminating them. It’s a film without a theme; a Cliffs Notes biography that has all of the facts and none of the truth.
The one interesting choice the filmmakers have made is to treat Hoover’s alleged homosexuality as fact rather than widely-believed conjecture, and much of the running time focuses on his relationship with right hand man and longtime companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, memorable as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network). But even here the treatment is fairly rudimentary, with the tacit implication being that Hoover’s sexuality is a result of his overly close relationship with his mother (Judi Dench). It’s lazy writing, the cheapest kind of pop psychology, reducing a complex and contradictory figure to a caricature easily understood by armchair Freudians.
Frankly, it’s amazing that DiCaprio is so good in the role, given the material he has to work with, but he disappears completely into the role, bringing the pugnacious, paranoid keeper of secrets to vivid life. To be fair, the entire cast is uniformly excellent, managing to imbue characters that are both thinly written and secretive by nature with individuality and texture. The production values are also of a high standard, but that’s a given; this is a big, glossy prestige picture, after all. Only some of the makeup prosthetics used to age the characters let the side down, with Hammer’s being particularly unconvincing.
In the end, J. Edgar isn’t so much a bad movie as a profoundly disappointing one. It’s almost incomprehensible that artists of this calibre could take a subject so fascinating - a man who wielded unimaginable political power for half a century, and was almost inevitably corrupted by it - and reduce it to such a dry and by-the-numbers story. It’s a film that wants to be stately and profound, but instead comes across as smug and shallow. Obviously conceived as award bait, J. Edgar’s actual destiny is to be quickly and quietly forgotten, a minor and faintly regrettable footnote on the resumes of all concerned.

_TRAVIS JOHNSON