J.
Edgar
Rated R. Our Ratings: V-4 ;L -5 ; S/N –1.
Running time: 2 hours 17 min.
 |
J. Edgar Hoover, with his assistant Clyde Tolson at his side, testifies
to a Congressional committee. © 2011 Warner brothers |
The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse—
who can understand it?
I the Lord test the mind
and search the heart,
to give to all according to their ways,
according to the fruit of their doings.
Jeremiah 17:9-10
It would have been easy to have skewered the once feared head of
the FBI as a self-righteous racist too cowardly to deal with his gender
problem, but fortunately neither director Clint Eastwood nor screenwriter
Dustin Lance Black were interested in doing so. Nor do they try to whitewash
his character, following the lead of the radio and G-Men movies of the
Thirties and Forties. We might have expected the conservative Eastwood
to lean that way, but not Black—after all, he wrote the screenplay for Milk. Instead what we
have is a “warts and all” biopic recognizing that this flawed
man was capable of much good, the monument to this being the FBI itself,
as well as much harm to those whom he opposed. The episodic film takes the
form of an elderly Hoover dictating to a series of young agents his memoirs,
the action shifting back and forth from the Sixties to the preceding decades,
beginning with the Twenties.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Hoover, spanning some fifty years,
is thus far a capstone to his distinguished career. The script well shows
the origins of Hoover’s fierce anti-Communism—in one scene he
says, “Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”—by
depicting the 1919 anarchist bombing of the home of Attorney General
Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson). This led to the Red Scare and the Palmer
Raids in which numerous anarchists and Communists were rounded up, some of
them being deported. On the night of the explosion Hoover, then holding a
low level position at the Justice Department, arrives on a bicycle at the
chaotic scene and notices right away how the police are carelessly trampling
any evidence that the perpetrators might have left. This concern for protecting
a crime scene and gathering evidence runs throughout the film, especially
in the episode of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby when Hoover gets into
an argument with state troopers over their heedless destruction of evidence.
The film spends most of its time on Hoover’s rise and his formation
of what was called the Bureau of Investigation. He carefully chose well groomed
and college educated men, even firing one who did not want to shave his mustache.
Time after time the Director appears before Congress to seek more funds for
his pet projects, such as a crime laboratory. His first lab was a makeshift
affair set up in the Justice department’s lounge, much to the dismay
of the senior staff who used it. Only after the Lindbergh case was he able
to acquire a central file for fingerprints, as well as a more permanent lab.
That Hoover was a master of promotion, both of the Bureau and of himself,
is artfully shown in many scenes. When he formed the agency public sympathy
lay with the criminals, as we see in the theater where a newsreel of Hoover
speaking is cut short, to the delight of the audience, and a film in which
the popular actor James Cagney glorifies a gangster is projected. Hoover
covertly allows writers of comic books and radio scripts access to case files,
resulting in the public coming to perceive G-Men as heroic crime fighters
protecting the public from gangsters. When he is accused of never having
actually held a gun and arresting a crook, Hoover does exactly that, making
sure that reporters are on hand to show him as a man of action. And woe to
an agent who captures any publicity so that he might become a rival!
The film does delve somewhat into Hoover’s private life, though because
he was so secretive, some of this is speculation. His relation to his mother
is shown as that of a Mother’s boy, the two living together until her
death. What a difficult, harsh mother she must have been! Anna Marie (Judi
Dench) at one point tells her son that she would prefer a dead son than one
who is a “daffodil,” this word apparently the forerunner of the
slur, “pansy.” After personally hiring Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer),
Hoover becomes so attracted to him that he makes him his personal assistant.
Although actor DiCaprio has said that he does not know for sure Hoover’s
sexual orientation, the film reveals their mutual attraction, Tolson planting
a kiss on his boss in one scene. Hoover pulls back so that we do not know
if there was any physical consummation beyond that. Much earlier, Hoover
had taken fellow employee Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) on a strange date to
the Library of Congress where he both showed off his knowledge of cataloging
and tried to come onto her. When she resisted him, he stopped. After that,
when he became Bureau head, their relationship was that of boss and devoted
secretary, her loyalty being shown in one of the scenes following Hoover’s
death.
Most of the film deals with people and events of the Twenties, Thirties and
Forties: there is a parade of famous names making cameo appearances—Mitchell
Palmer, Emma Goldman, Charles Lindbergh, Bruno Hauptmann, and Ginger and
Lela Rogers. Although Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon appear on screen,
it would have been nice had there been more footage devoted to the Sixties
and Hoover’s animosity to the Civil Rights Movement, and to his detestation
of Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular. In this respect a TV mini-series
would have been a better form in which to tell the fuller story. Nonetheless
what Eastwood and Black have compiled makes for an engrossing film experience.
The theme of “Knowledge is power” comes through strong, with
Hoover compiling files on virtually everyone in Washington, from Eleanor
Roosevelt through Nixon. Even with all their power neither Presidents nor
Attorney Generals dared to cross him lest he release some of the information
concerning their private indiscretions he held.
The filmmakers have brought us a tale of a conflicted man, one who fell far
short of greatness, but who achieved much. Those who despised him might learn
to appreciate some of his accomplishments through this film, and those who
admired him as a saint combating the evils of the time might acquire a more
rounded picture of his character—though none will ever fully understand
its cryptic nature. Director Eastwood continues to amaze his fans as he tackles
such a wide variety of film genres.
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