An essential performance from Leonardo DiCaprio makes this wildly ambitious drama believable.
Keith Bernstein/Warner
(out of 4)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts and Judi Dench. Directed by Clint Eastwood. 135 minutes. Opens Nov. 11 at major theatres. PG
“Let me tell you something. . .” says title star Leonardo DiCaprio at the start of J. Edgar, and there at once is the major strength and weakness of Clint Eastwood’s finely crafted new movie.
J. Edgar, penned by Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, tells us many things, possibly too many, about the late J. Edgar Hoover, the secretive FBI director who probed America’s nether regions for 48 years under eight presidents, from 1924-72.
Attentive both to rumour (the cross-dressing and the gay lover) and to historical fact (the crime-busting and the empire building), the film almost overwhelms us with its careful amassing of detail about this fascinating man/monster, whom DiCaprio portrays as a youth unto old age.
J. Edgar nevertheless succeeds in illuminating Hoover, despite the faded hues of Tom Stern’s desaturated colour cinematography and Eastwood’s austere direction and minimalist score. The spotlight is powered largely by the wattage of DiCaprio’s formidable central performance.
Even under the heavy layers of latex and makeup required to convincingly transform his baby cheeks to Hoover’s bulldog jowls, DiCaprio wrings truth out of a cipher. The Hoover of both headline and whispers comes into sharp relief in this Oscar-beckoning performance.
And how he’s grown: DiCaprio’s Hoover is so much more mature and convincing than his Howard Hughes of The Aviator.
The FBI boss is first seen in his Washington office, dictating his memoirs (Untitled FBI Story, a title page blandly reveals) to one of a series of skeptical agents who have been seconded as involuntary typists.
It’s a framing technique employed by Eastwood and Black to efficiently span the decades from 1919, when a youthful Hoover was busting bomb-hurling American Bolsheviks, up to 1972, when he’s on his final case, which amounts to eluding Richard M. Nixon and his Oval Office thugs.
Far from the brooding figure of authority and menace he will grow to become, the younger Hoover is seen as a bumpkin. He’s under the control of his frightfully attentive mother (the reliable Judi Dench), who wants him to remove the perceived stain of his addled father’s failings.
“You will restore our family to greatness,” she tells him, later warning him that greatness includes straightness: “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son.”
A librarian by training, Hoover’s idea of showing a girl a good time is to take her to the Library of Congress, to demonstrate his file-organizing skills. It’s here that he makes an embarrassing grab for government typist Helen Gandy (a thoroughly deglammed Naomi Watts), who will resist his attempts at amour but accept his offer to be both his secretary and keeper of his secrets.
Hoover’s clumsiness turns canny by the time he meets his true love: the immaculately attired gentleman Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), whose height the shorter Hoover attempts to approximate by standing on a stealth platform behind his desk. Tolson may be lacking in police credentials, but he’s a loyal (and campy) Sancho Panza to Hoover’s Don Quixote, and loyalty is what counts most to the perpetually suspicious, paranoid and self-aggrandizing Hoover, who tangles with both the high and the low.
Many famous characters walk J. Edgar’s stage, including James Cagney (seen as both gangster and G-man in brief film clips), John F. Kennedy (heard but not seen), Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) and Richard Nixon (Christopher Shyer).
The film’s middle section is given over to the 1932 kidnapping of the infant son of hero aviator Charles Lindbergh (Josh Lucas) and the subsequent trial that shocked a nation. The story is included, perhaps too completely, to show how Hoover exploited the crime to confirm his nascent FBI as a national police authority, one armed with innovative new forensic tools and sweeping new powers of investigation.
By this point deep into J. Edgar, Hoover’s voice of authority begins to tremble. The historical record is questioned and rumour gains credence — Eastwood discreetly suggests how both the cross-dressing kinks and man-loving thrills may have been realized.
As our eyebrows rise along with those of the put-upon FBI typists, faithful Tolson, whose own makeup people should be arrested, delivers the unkindest cut of all. He accuses Hoover of putting his ego ahead of the interests of the country he’s sworn to serve.
It’s a fair cop, officer, but then as we see in J. Edgar, Hoover early on warned against naïve credulity: “Trust no one, not even our fellow agents.”
Good advice for watching this wildly ambitious yet admirable undertaking, which leaves us with no tears, but also a bizarrely melodramatic coda about the power of love.
But with his essential performance, Leonardo DiCaprio gives us something to truly believe in.
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