Review of Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Josh Lucas, Armie Hammer and Ed Westwick.
You would be inclined to think that the person who has the greatest impact on your understanding of J. Edgar Hoover in the new film J. Edgar would be Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the head of the FBI over a 40-year span. Or you might think it would be Clint Eastwood, the picture's director. In both cases, you'd be wrong. No, the most interesting name in the credits is that of Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for scribing "Milk," and who has now turned his gaze on Hoover, the longtime lawman who died a bachelor, and who has long been rumored to be gay.
You see, J. Edgar is actually Black's take on Hoover's, and by the looks of things, Hoover—who was by all accounts a wretched, insecure, monster of a person—gets a pretty good shake from the writer. Sure, the fact that Leo plays him doesn't hurt, but many of Hoover's nasty qualities—the paranoia, the blackmail, the hoarding of information and power—are played out through justification, meaning that the audience is often given to understand that Hoover had valid reasons—at least in his own head—for doing the awful things that he did.
Much of that is due, I suppose to the method in which the story is told. Hoover is dictating his memoirs, which allows him to be his own unreliable narrator. That's a terrific idea, because much of what Hoover selectively remembers is self-aggrandizing. Still, you can't help but feel that even Black still should have spent more time examining Hoover's sexuality. Yes, it's certainly suggested that he was likely closeted and in love with his longtime aide Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), but J. Edgar also suggests that because of society's attitudes towards homosexuality at the time, Hoover is to be pitied to a degree, because he was never able to truly be himself, and therefore many of the negative qualities that surfaced over the course of his career were due to his isolation and loneliness.
Certainly, that could be the case. That said, do we need to feel pity for J. Edgar Hoover, a man who started his career as a rabid anti-communist before setting his sights on the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Debatable at best. And all of that said, though Hoover was dedicated to fighting crime, the crime J. Edgar cannot fight is that of tedium. Simply put, and despite DiCaprio's performance, which, like most of his work, is thoughtful and deliberate, this is a long, dull, self-important movie. DiCaprio is good, but we really gain no insight into Hoover himself, and certainly don't have an understanding of his stunted emotional life. There may be mysteries in history, such as whether Charles Lindbergh's child was kidnapped by only one man (the case is one of the film's backdrops), and the true persona of J. Edgar Hoover is one of them. But not all mysteries need to be solved, and this is definitely one of them.