J. Edgar

Clint Eastwood – 2011 – USA

J. Edgar Hoover’s career is one of the most fascinating in the history of American politics, but you’d never know it from this impeccably polished by-the-numbers biography by director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.  Like a quickie TV movie – (such as one that was already made as early as 1978) – it rehashes the tired framework of an old man recounting his memoirs to justify a series of flashbacks to key events in his life.  Matinee idol Leonardo DiCaprio is totally unsuited as the famously squat bulldog-faced Hoover, and his cumbersome make-up as ‘old’ Hoover doesn’t much help.  This feels like an extremely expensive high school play with kids playing grown-ups with great earnestness.  I have nothing against Eastwood as a director, nor DiCaprio as an actor, but the structure of this film is so unoriginal that it seems simply lazy, a semi-ambitious book report by a young hot-shot screenwriter anxious to boast of his copious research.  While feigning prim respectability, it also hypocritically dabbles into pure speculation about Hoover’s mysterious sexuality.  Probably worst of all, J. Edgar – for all its breadth – fails to address the pertinent fact that Hoover’s headline-grabbing crusades against small-time outlaws and communists, combined with his fuzzy relationship with underworld figures, allowed the Mafia to achieve nearly untouchable heights of power throughout his reign as FBI Director.  I’ve never understood why Hollywood is attracted to these sweeping, decades-long bio-pics that keep the audience entirely unable to latch onto any dramatic line.  The model recent historical/biographical movies, in my view, were the competing Truman Capote films of 2005/06, Capote and Infamous, which narrowed their focus to one crucial episode to serve as a microcosm for the subject’s life rather than straining to be laboriously comprehensive.  Inexplicably rated ‘R’ for what’s described by the geniuses on the MPAA board as “brief strong language.”