J.Edgar

J.Edgar

Early on in J.Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s sumptuous, ambitious bio-pic of one of 20^th century America’s most powerful and controversial figures, while dictating his memoirs to a junior FBI agent (Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass, Ed Westwick), the elderly J.Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) says: “What’s critical at this moment is that we re-clarify the difference between villain and hero.” 

He’s reminiscing about his old boss, former US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, but there lies the nub of Eastwood’s film which casts Hoover as tragic Shakespearean anti-hero; a well-intentioned man perverted and consumed by hubris and paranoia.

Told mostly in flashback and spanning 50 years, J.Edgar charts Hoover’s career from 1919 to his death in 1972 through his relationships with the three most important people in his life; his long-suffering, intensely loyal secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his devoted colleague and companion Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) and his domineering mother Anna (Judi Dench). 

A tireless champion of the scientific investigation of crime, the young Hoover begins his career battling anarchists and hunting communists in the aftermath of the Great War.  A shrewd political operator, he manoeuvers himself into the position of Acting Head of the fledgling Bureau of Investigation (later the Federal Bureau of Investigation) which he rules like as his own personal fiefdom, building it into the monolithic structure it is today with the aid of Gandy and Tolson.  His pursuit of the bank robbing outlaw folk heroes of the Great Depression (Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis, John Dillinger) wins him headlines, coining phrases like “public enemies” and “G-man,” while the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh Baby pioneers early forensic techniques.  But behind the public perception of the dogged crime fighter lies a man riddled with insecurities, propped up by his Lady Macbeth-esque mother who poisons both his mind and his sexuality, sowing the seeds of the megalomaniac voyeur who would rise to become arguably the most powerful man in America, blackmailing and bullying presidents, politicians and public figures while terrorising the Left. 

A handsome bio-pic that’s as much a study of the delicate and perceptive nature of truth, J.Edgar, like Faith Of Our Fathers before it, sees Eastwood deconstructing the myths that modern America is built on.  The four decades since his death has seen a major revision of Hoover’s image, the rumour and innuendo that dogged him (his alleged transvestitism and homosexuality, his tyrannical excesses, his voyeurism), accepted as fact.  You’d be forgiven then for assuming that J.Edgar will be a salacious exposé of the man’s personal foibles and public hypocrisy.  But what Eastwood and Milk writer Dustin Lance Black have attempted is something more interesting: a genius of spin and media manipulation, they’ve allowed Hoover to tell his own story as he remembers it complete with inconsistencies, half-truths and Hoover’s unshakeable conviction. 

So we get a potted history of his life and triumphs, his forging of the FBI, his lifelong crusade against Communism, while skating over entire decades (the Second World War and the McCarthy witch hunts are curiously absent, though McCarthy at least warrants a dismissive mention), reality only occasionally intruding on Hoover’s unreliable narrative as in his dealings with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King or when the elderly Tolson points out that the shameless self-publicist never actually made the many arrests he took credit for, never met the principals of some of his biggest cases, that his life is a lie.

The treatment of Hoover’s sexuality, while speculative, is arresting.  Lifelong bachelors who lived their lives in each other pockets, Hoover and Tolson have long been assumed lovers.  They ate lunch and dinner together every day, spent all their free time with one another, vacationed together and were always seen together publicly.  With the exception of a hotel room spat that gets a bit Brokeback, Eastwood and Black have chosen to make their love unrequited, their attraction unconsummated, due in large part to the neuroses imprinted by Hoover’s mother.  In perhaps the most devastating scene of the film, noticing the palpable attraction between Hoover and Tolson, Hoover’s mother icily informs her son “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil.”  For Eastwood and Black, the sublimation of Hoover’s natural desires is what comes to drive the darker aspects of his nature; his hypocrisy, his vindictiveness.

As ever Eastwood’s direction is powerfully, beautifully understated.  DiCaprio gives a barnstorming, charismatic performance of an uncharismatic demagogue, essaying a complex, sympathetic Hoover who’s never actually likable.  As his mother, Judi Dench is both terrifying and seductive.  If Lady Macbeth hadn’t been barren…  Naomi Watts and Armie Hammer lend solid support as Gandy and Tolson respectively in what at first appears to be underwritten roles but this is Hoover’s story, this is how he remembers it.  As shrewd a judge of personal weakness as he may have been, it’s clear that Hoover never really knew the two people in his life who were closest to him.  They remain enigmas to him because he can’t understand why they love him, why he commands their loyalty.  Watts beautifully transforms from a young, idealistic girl to a weary, disillusioned woman, disappointed by but still loyal to the man to whom she’s devoted her life.  Hammer (ill-served by his old man make-up) meanwhile is the closest thing to a moral centre to the film.  He alone stands up to Hoover, understands him, loves him but isn’t blinded by his love.

An intricate, complex character study that ultimately bites off more than it can easily chew, Eastwood’s J.Edgar is bold, ambitious movie making.

David Watson

Director

Clint Eastwood

Writers

Dustin Lance Black

Cast

Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Armie Hammer, Josh Lucas, Dermot Mulroney, Zach Grenier, Denis O’Hare, Stephen Root, Damon Herriman, Jeffrey Donovan, Ed Westwick

Country

USA

Running time

137 minutes

Year

2011