I like Clint Eastwood’s acting in the films of Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, and I like quite a few of Clint Eastwood’s films as a director, from Play Misty For Me (1971) through to his anti-racist epic, Gran Torino (2008). I even like his tasteful weepy, The Bridges of Madison County. But with J. Edgar, this insightful liberal-leaning Republican, who is elsewhere so acute about the merits of John Ford (in Peter Bogdanovich’s 2006 documentary Directed by John Ford), has made a molehill out of a mountain.
People rave about Eastwood, and he is a great actor, but as a director he can turn out turkeys. Every Which Way But Loose? Certainly not. Billion-Dollar Baby? Though moving, its castigation of the heroine boxer’s trailer-trash family was way over the top. And here we have a terrific subject: the founder and, over eight presidents’ terms, the director of the FBI. And what do we get? A biopic that starts off quite political, swiftly turns into a crime drama and ends up touching on the Kennedys and on Martin Luther King, but for the most part rubs up close to Hoover’s homosexual inclinations. Big deal.
The cinematography is luminous and the production is, too. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a titanic performance as ‘Speed’ – J Edgar Hoover’s childhood nickname, which stayed with him throughout his life. But J. Edgar simply loses its way. We are told that, by the 1930s, Hoover shifted his attention from communists to bank robbers, but we see nothing of his continued and ferocious campaigns, during the Depression, against trade unions. By the time the film gets to the Cold War era, it is all about Hoover’s iffy relationship with his mother and about his romance with his tweedy deputy, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).
This is a movie about Hoover’s personal identity, not about his historical significance. Now this can easily be forgiven, but in Hoover’s case it was always going to be hard to understate his political record – as Eastwood does. However, especially since the publication of Anthony Summers’ Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), nearly all commentary on Hoover and even the FBI’s distaste for J. Edgar has revolved around his homosexuality, his cross-dressing and, to a lesser extent, his black ancestors.
Like much of feminist biography, the film dwells not on its subject’s public achievements, but on his private life. In the process, and despite two à laMussolini balcony sequences of Hoover imagining he was president, Eastwood exonerates the FBI chief.
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