Reviews, Interviews , News, Commentaries, My Top 5 Movies, Best-Of Lists, Filmmakers of Faith, Film ForumJ. Edgar
The life and work of J. Edgar Hoover offers grist for a dozen different movies or more, and Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar wants to be all of them at once. It's the sort of staidly respectable, competently directed biopic that gives a bad name to competently directed biopics, and possibly to respectability.
Everything that ought to happen does happen, but seldom with much sense of urgency or revelation. The one question in which the screenplay by Dustin Lance Black (writer of the biopic Milk, about gay-rights activist Harvey Milk) takes a vital interest is whether the perpetual flirtation between Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his right-hand man Clyde Tolson (The Social Network's Armie Hammer) will or won't spill over into physicality.
Like Richard Attenborough's reverential Chaplin (starring Robert Downey Jr,), J. Edgar takes a lazy shortcut to summarizing its subject's life: depicting the great man dictating his memoir, the better to assure his legacy and that of his beloved agency. This device allows Black to put in Hoover's mouth nuggets apparently drawn from his own notes for the screenplay, such as, "Believe what you will about historians—most write from a present perspective, forgetting context." And "Let's leave that to the reader's imagination. It's important to preserve a bit of mystery about our hero." Hoover even goes so far as to caution his scribe that "Even great men can be corrupted"—meaning, of course, other great men.
Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar does offer some historical context. A dramatic early depiction of the anarchist bombings of 1919 and the Palmer raids that followed, including a raid on the Russian People's House in New York that allegedly turned up bomb-making material, reminds us that there was some real basis for the Red scare. A vignette in a movie theater depicting an audience booing a clip of Hoover, then cheering when the projectionist cuts Hoover short and starts a Jimmy Cagney gangster feature, illustrates the folk-hero status that gangland figures enjoyed in those days, and offers some perspective on Hoover's interest in promoting the figure of the heroic G-man in comic books and movies.
But it's not enough to show us these things: Hoover has to say things like "They've forgotten the bombs, the terror, the raids." And "Just like the Communist before him, the gangster finally fell from favor; now children dreamed of joining the FBI." The more he explains to his biographers, the less room there is for the mystery that Hoover himself told us is needed. Toward the end, the film undercuts some of what we've seen by revealing that Hoover hasn't been honest with his biographers, but here too we're simply told what happened in a way that undermines rather than enhances any mystery.
Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson
Over the course of its long 137-minute running length, J. Edgar hits all the expected marks. The film makes much of Hoover's doting but domineering mother Anna Marie (Judi Dench), who tells her son at one point that she'd rather have a dead son than one who is a "daffodil" (daffodils apparently being equivalent in this connection to pansies). The Lindbergh kidnapping gets a prolonged chapter. The Kansas City massacre, the JFK assassination, and Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. are all present and accounted for. Shirley Temple and Ginger Rodgers put in appearances. Yet the film has little if anything interesting to say about any of this.
Star Trek Into Darkness
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Gerald Mucci
The perverts on the Hollywood left have been masterful on this one. Not only have they assumed all the innuendo about J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged perversities in this movie, they hammer them into the viewers psyche by making these perversities the major theme. In fact one statement toward the conclusion of this smear, portrayed as an objective 3rd party conclusion to Hoover’s life, is this line which I loosely quote: “Love will flourish once the unnatural divisions of mankind can be overcome.” The “unnatural divisions of mankind” that are referred to in the context of this statement is the distinction between male and female, and the gender roles to which our religion, culture and morality have historically ascribed . In other words, those who abide by the heterosexual standard are the perverts, and those who eliminate those “horrible divisions” are the real heroes. Is that a quote from something Hoover actually pronounced or is it the creation of the movie producers? Since the movie proclaimed that virtually all of Hoover’s secret documents were destroyed, it is most likely a made up Hollywood wish.
Sandra B
Okay, I COMPLETELY disagree about DiCaprio's looks, on most other points I agree. Not sure how you'd solve the 'problem' of men aging differently these days (get a 60 year old to play a guy through a few decades?) but if anyone looks like they could be from the past, it's DiCaprio. He is one of the few actors who really looks like his face is made to do period films, particularly something from the early to mid 20th century. When he was in his teens/early 20s he looked like an average LA punk, but after that he's fit into period dramas like a glove. This may be a bit of a negative for him, though he's managed pretty well with a somewhat easy solution: Whenever he does something contemporary he puts on facial hair (like in The Departed, Body of Lies or Blood Diamond) to somewhat mask the fact he seems to belong in another lifetime.
Greg M
Not a bad movie if you have nothing else to do. I went to see it because I did not know that much about J. Edgar and wanted to learn more. That was the wrong reason to see this movie. I quickly saw the movie turning into another, "gay in your face" Hollywood diatribe that makes you squirm in your seat. Consequently, I did some research after seeing the movie and find that the "rumors" about Hoover's "gayness" were never really substantiated and that people describe his relationship with his no. 2 guy as more of a brotherly friendship. Leave it to Hollywood to try to twist that into something it's not - and make this guy out to be the biggest flamer since Harvey Milk. I wouldn't recommend the movie for this reason -- dishonesty again, in the face of yet another gay agenda opportunity.