It's a tough thing, making a biopic. For the most part, the people who are worth making a movie about usually lead lives so jam packed with incident that any attempt to distill them inevitibly fails to do justice to the subject. But biopics that try to cram too much into their story arc run the risk of being too long and threaten to bore the audience. The best biopics -- "Lawrence of Arabia" comes to mind -- find enough detail to make their subjects interesting while skimming enough out of this lives to keep the audience throughly entertained.
Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is an odd duck of a biopic. Its subject -- longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover -- would be a challenge for even the most ruthless biographer. Rumored to be gay at a time when that sort of thing was a career and potentially life ender, he rose to the top of the federal police force accumulating piles of damaging information on everyone from celebrities to presidents. People in power were said to be afraid of him because of the blackmail he allegedly held
on them. And that made him even more powerful than them.
But the strange thing about "J. Edgar" is that while it tells the story of a detail- obsessed man, it fails to give a sense of how those details turned him into such a powerful figure. And since -- by many accounts -- Hoover wielded that power with an iron fist, there's a hole at the center of the movie that some great performances just can't quite fill.
The movie covers about 50 years of Hoover's life, starting with his early work with the old Bureau of Investigation. After a series of anarchist bombings in Washington D.C. in 1919, Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed) starts to realize that investigators aren't keeping track of evidence the way he thinks they should. He's obsession with detail eventually leads to the Palmer Raids (named after the U.S. Attorney General at the time),where agents raided suspected communists whom Hoover believed were the nation's biggest threat. The raids help raise his profile and get him installed as the head of the newly formed FBI, which Hoover revamps into a no-nonsense force of young, highly educated men.
One of the men who catches Hoover's eye, in more ways than one, is Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, The Social Network) who gets courted and hired by Hoover, eventually becoming his deputy and one of his most trusted confidantes, along with secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts, King Kong). The rest of the film is devoted to showing how Hoover turned the FBI into an elite law enforcement entity by embracing cutting edge investigative techniques like fingerprinting, while also showing his growing relationship with Tolson. The movie suggests the two men never consummated their relationship largely because Hoover was such a button-down person who was never as comfortable dealing with people one-on-one as he was ruling over them.
It's a fascinating dichotomy, but "J. Edgar" never fully embraces it. We get lots of information about his efforts to build up the FBI -- all very interesting stuff -- and we see enough of Hoover and Tolson together to get a pretty good sense of how they felt about each other. Where the film falls short, though, is in tying together Hoover's hunger for power with his obsession for his own privacy. Here was a man who thought nothing of digging into the lives of the rich and powerful, yet barely let anyone into his own inner circle. For some odd reason Eastwood (Unforgiven) and his screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black (Milk) chose to hold back on Hoover's character and as a result, the whole movie suffers.
That's not to say there isn't plenty to enjoy here. The production design is spot on, and Eastwood's feel for the period is sublime. Despite the lack of depth to Hoover, DiCaprio takes what he's given and works wonders with it, showing us many differerent facets of Hoover from his 20s to his 80s. Hammer is perfect upper class ice as Tolson, though his unfortunate old-age makeup makes him look like a reject from "Alien Nation." And Watts and Judi Dench (Casino Royale) -- playing Hoover's
mother -- do solid work, even though they are largely pushed to the film's margins.
"J. Edgar" is an entertaining enough movie, but as a biography its a missed opportunity.
*** (out of 4)
Great interview! My wife wasn't interested so I didn't get to see it, even though I tried to convince her it was worthwhile. I'm kind of disappointed that they only suggest Hoover and Tolson's relationship. If I'm mistaken, didn't they live together for many years? Did they show that?
No matter, when this hits video I'll check it out.
Posted by: Zeke Springer | 11/27/2011 at 11:44 AM
Yes, they did show Tolson and Hoover living together and implied that they were longtime companions with a strong emotional, if not physical, relationship. The movie is really worth seeing for the excellent performances. It's hardly a definitive biography of Hoover.
Posted by: Rob | 11/27/2011 at 01:40 PM