Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s homo-empathy in J. Edgar results in an unusually ambivalent biopic. It turns your hoary Liberal screed against legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover into a plea considering his human frailties and emotional conflicts (which were sexual more than political). Problem is, Black’s complicated approach is not well served by director Clint Eastwood’s bizarre simplifications.
Stylistically, Eastwood flipflops. His perverse black-and-green color scheme turns the story gothic like all his other movies, making Hoover alternately pathetic or monstrous. Eastwood must be the most over-rated filmmaker since Sidney Lumet and he shares a similarly cheesey filmmaking approach that unsophisticated viewers find “ironic”—a comment on itself as when Hoover and his confidant Tolson walk through barely-constructed sets or hastily framed locations.
But because Eastwood is ponderous, bordering on morose, his tacky technique cheapens Black’s attempt at complexity. Eastwood plays his usual game appeasing Liberals and Conservatives but this is exposed by Black’s emotional details and Leonardo DiCaprio’s eager-beaver empathy. Avoiding the mistakes of his disastrous The Aviator, DiCaprio roots Hoover’s tics and oddities in guilelessness that becomes rigid. The wit of the performance prevents turning this into a political rationale (that’s Black’s intent; he writes Hoover less ostentatiously than Tony Kushner wrote Roy Cohn in Angels in America) yet Eastwood’s ghoulish perspective (sinister attention to the infelicities of bad old-age make-up) undercuts Black’s achievement.
J. Edgar’s time-shifting uses a regrettable 20th Century’s Greatest Hits structure to show the reach of Hoover’s long tenure—from combating Bolsheviks, petitioning Congress for more “power to protect” and eventually monitoring the Executive Branch. It’s almost Michael Mann-shallow, preventing the characterizations from deepening. DiCaprio at first interacts touchingly with Naomi Watts as his equally peculiar secretary Helen Gandy and Armie Hammer as confidante Clyde Tolson, but then their intimacies skid by.
And it’s a slow fall downhill. Eastwood uses the Lindberg kidnapping to indulge his penchant for child murder (as in his creepy Changeling), then blames Hoover’s flaws on a domineering mother (Judi Dench), linking homophobia to incest to transvestism. That’s for Liberals who are unworthy of Black’s effort to bring even a political rival into the brotherhood. For Conservatives, Eastwood pushes law-and-order routines: Unfun versions of The Untouchables where Hoover claims credit for gang busting in order to increase the FBI’s public profile and occasional social lessons on terrorism (“They’ve forgotten the [anarchist’s] bombs”) and endangered liberty (“We must never forget our history!”).
Larry Cohen’s 1976 The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover was a near masterpiece of human insight (Broderick Crawford’s soft, experienced voice beats DiCaprio’s hard, choppy delivery) and had a broad, deep, overview of political change. Cohen genuinely understood how people lived in their time with their feelings. Black’s contrast of human and social needs throughout Hoover’s life attempts something similar but sometimes errs as with Hammer’s smirky, flirty flamboyance—a p.c. ploy that sets-up acceptable vs. unacceptable styles of difference. Too bad Eastwood stages it as grand guignol.
