J.Edgar News and Reviews

What a transformation: Leonardo DiCaprio is unrecognisable
as an elderly J. Edgar Hoover
October 28th 2011, Sarah Fitzmaurice, Mail Online

With a receding hair line thinning fast, deep lines etched across his weathered face and a stoop that comes with old age Leonardo DiCaprio looks unrecognisable in new stills from his latest film.

The actor, 36, has been transformed to look twice his age as part of his portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo takes on the role of the controversial FBI director in the film J, Edgar, which is set for release in the U.S. at the start of November.

Gone is the floppy blonde fringe Leonardo fans know and love, replaced by liver spots, excess weight around the middle and heavy bags under his eyes as Leonardo portrays the iconic man throughout his life. Hoover is credited with founding the FBI and remained director right up until his death in 1972. In one shot the actor is seen with co-star Armie Hammer, who has also been propelled into old age. In another the actor is playing the law enforcer as an ambitious young man, while a third shows a different side to Hoover as he leaves his dinner guests captivated with conversation at a glamorous meal. The story follows his life as he moulds the Federal Bureau of Investigation into an efficient crime-fighting agency, introducing modern technologies including fingerprinting and forensic laboratories.

Above: Clint directing on the set of J.Edgar

Apart from the physical transformation, which with the help of make-up sees the actor age from his thirties into his seventies, another hurdle DiCaprio has to overcome is alluding to being gay. While Hoover, who served in office between 1924 until 1935, denied he was homosexual, rumours circulated that he had an affair with Clyde Tolson, an associate director of the FBI who was his heir.

During one scene in the back of a taxi, the camera zooms in to see DiCaprio holding hands with Tolson, played by The Social Network star Armie Hammer. Hammer, 25, is a rising US actor who starred as both twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in the social networking biopic centred on Mark Zuckerberg.

The trailer focuses on Hoover's rise to notoriety, with flashback scenes of when he was a young boy, and fast-forwarding to his glory years with the tagline, 'Even great men can be corrupted'.

He later became the face of law enforcement in America for almost 50 years, and was equally feared as he was admired. But behind closed doors, he held secrets that would have destroyed his powerful image, including psychological issues and bending the rules to discover the truth. The star-studded cast also boasts home grown talents Naomi Watts and Judi Dench, who plays DiCaprio's mother.

Million Dollar Baby director Clint Eastwood continues his filmmaking genius behind the lens, while Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, penned the script. J. Edgar will premiere at the AFI film festival on November 3, and will be released in cinemas in the US a week later. It will be in UK cinemas on January 20.
The Man in Charge
“J. Edgar.”by David Denby
The New Yorker, November 14, 2011

Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is, of all things, a portrait of a soul. The movie is a nuanced account of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a sympathetic monster, a compound of intelligence, repression, and misery—a man whose inner turmoil, tamed and sharpened, irrupts in authoritarian fervor. Eastwood and the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have re-created that period in the nineteen-twenties and thirties when a righteous young man with a stentorian style could electrify a nation. Outraged by scattered bomb plots and shifting values—what seems to him the moral chaos of modern life—Hoover senses that Americans need safety, or, at least, the illusion of safety, and he becomes the vessel of their protection, exercising and justifying, with ironclad rhetoric, his own dominance.

The movie has the structure of a conventional bio-pic. It begins in 1919, when the twenty-four-year-old Hoover, employed by the Justice Department to track “alien subversives,” shows up on his bicycle at the Washington house of his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, after it has been bombed by anarchists. The film traces Hoover’s rise from that shocking moment: his creation of the F.B.I., within the Justice Department; his corrupt and intimidating hold on the directorship; his successes, failures, and phobias; and his shaky last days. Yet “J. Edgar” is saved from the usual stiffness of the bio-pic form by the emotionally unsettled nature of its hero, a man vamped and controlled by his mother (Judi Dench), and afraid of his own sexuality, yet desperate for companionship. For decades, Hoover works at the Bureau with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) and carries on a chaste love affair with him. The two natty gents go to clubs and the races together, and spend weekends chaffing, quarrelling, and pledging their affections. This Hoover is a tyrant, a liar, and a prig, but he is also, in his impacted way, capable of love.

“J. Edgar”—a collaboration with the activist gay screenwriter of “Milk”—represents another remarkable turn in Clint Eastwood’s career. Remarkable, but not altogether surprising. Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar, working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry. As the filmmakers tell it, the roots of Hoover’s manias lie in his nature. The movie bears a thematic resemblance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), in which a repressed homosexual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the nineteen-thirties, longing for “normality,” joins the Italian Fascist Party and operates as an amoral bullyboy. “J. Edgar” is the story of how a similarly repressed personality might operate in a democracy. The answer is privately, by accumulating secrets and blackmailing anyone who is even remotely a threat to his standing; and publicly, by making himself and his outfit pop-culture icons and then bending the government to his whim. The frame for the movie is the Director, in old age, dictating the story of his career to a series of young men from the Bureau. Black and Eastwood use this plot device ironically: Hoover is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, and the way Eastwood stages the actual events suggests that Hoover is pumping up his own role and stretching the truth.

The dark-toned cinematography, by Tom Stern, is as redolent of the past as old leather and walnut. The images are heavily shadowed, with faces often seen half in darkness, a visual hint that these people do not know themselves very well. Hoover’s ethics and his style are traditionalist in tone but radical in application. He flourishes at a time when powerful men are perfectly groomed and dressed—and cloaked in secrecy. Fanatically dedicated to appearances, they are fooling themselves, perhaps, as much as others. In the movie’s portrait of pre-electronic America, Hoover pierces those appearances with wiretaps, bugs, and the lowly file card, an early database that, aided by his longtime secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he wields to devastating effect. Nonetheless, Hoover is fixated on his own image and on that of the Bureau. Outraged that the public is enjoying the panache of Jimmy Cagney as a gangster, in such early-thirties pictures as “The Public Enemy,” Hoover lends his name and his support to Hollywood films, and, by the middle of the decade, Cagney is firing a gun on behalf of the government.

Hoover may be treated semi-satirically, but neither Black nor Eastwood suggests that the dangers and the national weaknesses he combatted early in his career were illusory. In 1920, crime detection was primitive. Hoover insists that the country needs an armed national police force and modern forensic methods—a fingerprint bank, up-to-date labs, and the like. Bursting into rooms at the Justice Department, and shouting down objections, he orders equipment, space, and training, and holds everyone to account. His new scientific methods lead, in 1934, to the capture of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. The complicated story of the Bureau is dramatized in flashes, as an emanation of Hoover’s will. This technique is inadequate as history but almost inevitable in a movie. What interests Black and Eastwood more than institutional lore is what Hoover did with the power he accumulated.

Again and again, he goes too far, treating Communist rhetorical bluster as the first stages of revolution, assembling lists of people whose opinions he considers suspect, fabricating documents, planting stories in the newspapers, bludgeoning potential enemies with his file drawers of sexual gossip. A single scene with Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan)—in the early sixties, when, as Attorney General, he was Hoover’s boss—stands in for Hoover’s relations with the various Presidents who longed to be rid of him but didn’t dare show him the door. Hoover tells Kennedy that he has evidence of his brother’s sexual escapades with dubious women, and his job remains intact. His smarmy prurience becomes a factor in national policy. He and Tolson giggle over an intercepted letter to Eleanor Roosevelt from Lorena Hickok, the reporter who became Roosevelt’s close friend and, possibly, her lover. As an old man, he holes up in a room to listen to tape recordings of Martin Luther King, Jr., having sex with a woman in a hotel. Eastwood stages the sexual scene as shadows on a wall. Hoover’s immobile, fascinated face is the obscene element in the episode.

The film moves fast, but Eastwood’s touch is light and sure, his judgment sound, the moments of pathos held just long enough. And he cast the right star as his equivocal hero-fool. In the past, such beetle-browed heavyweights as Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, and Bob Hoskins have played Hoover. By using DiCaprio, and then aging him with prosthetic makeup, Eastwood lets us see how a slender, good-looking young man might thicken and coarsen with years and power. DiCaprio, extending his vowels into a Washington drawl (Hoover was a local boy), focusses energy in his bulldog forehead; the body, increasingly sausage-packed into tight-fitting suits as Hoover gets older, is immobile, unused, mere weight. DiCaprio never burlesques Hoover, but when he meets Armie Hammer’s Tolson in his office for the first time he breaks into a sweat. Hammer—tall, handsome, suave yet gentle, with a sweet smile—gives a charming, soft-shoe performance that, in a memorable scene, explodes into jealous rage.

Hoover was in power for almost fifty years, and the filmmakers leave out many particulars of his reign. Despite frequent references to Hoover’s loathing of Communism (which he convinces himself is poisoning the civil-rights movement), Eastwood and Black omit his active role in the rise of the Red-baiting pols Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The filmmakers concentrate on the Bureau’s successes in capturing or killing the tommy-gun bank robbers of the thirties but overlook Hoover’s odd, and possibly corrupt, unwillingness to take organized crime seriously, even as, in the forties and fifties, the Mafia was draining millions from the economy. Liberals will find much in the movie that condemns Hoover’s trampling of civil liberties, but may be dismayed by the insistence that an emerging national power needed a secret police force. Gay activists may be disappointed by the filmmakers’ restrained assumptions about Hoover’s sexuality, though the destructive effects of self-denial have rarely been dramatized in such withering detail. Hoover, we realize, is obsessed with keeping America safe because he feels unsafe himself. Internal subversion is a personal, not just a political, threat to him. No stranger man—not even Nixon—has ever been at the center of an American epic.

J. Edgar By Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.

November 10, 2011


Say this for Leonardo DiCaprio: He doesn't scare off easy from acting challenges. At 37, he's already played billionaire Howard Hughes (The Aviator), junkie Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), great imposter Frank Abagnale Jr. (Catch Me If You Can) and Shakespeare's Romeo. In J. Edgar, DiCaprio ages from his twenties to his seventies to play America's feared and loathed top cop. And despite being buried in layers of (often too obvious) prosthetic latex, DiCaprio is a roaring wonder in the role. He needs to be. Until his death in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover ruled the Federal Bureau of Investigation like a bulldog no one would dare leash. That includes eight presidents, Martin Luther King Jr. and even Marilyn Monroe. For half a century Hoover nosed into private lives to control his enemies, and some friends. But Hoover had secrets too, and now acclaimed director Clint Eastwood, 81, and Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, 37, are doing the nosing around.



The result is a movie exhilarated by biting off more than it can chew, a great boon especially when the pacing goes from rushed to dramatically inert. The tabloid version of Hoover as a cross-dressing closet queen is addressed, but not exploited. Black's script isn't linear; it jumps back and forth in time with impressionistic glee, hoping to get a fix on an unknowable public figure.


The film focuses on those closest to J. Edgar: his autocratic mother, Annie Hoover (a splendid Judi Dench); his protective secretary, Helen Gandy (a sutured Naomi Watts); and FBI associate director Clyde Tolson (a live-wire Armie Hammer), the lawyer who became J. Edgar's constant companion.


Of course, Hoover's greatest obsession was America and his need to protect it from commies and radicals. In dark and weighted images, Eastwood charts Hoover's rise and all-consuming myth-building. Though Hoover did popularize fingerprinting and the collection of forensic evidence (the CSI TV franchise is in his debt), he liked giving himself credit where it wasn't due, for killing gangster John Dillinger, solving the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, and being the ultimate G-man, making arrests and capturing bad guys. Eastwood busts that myth with the same fury with which he undercut the codes of the Old West in Unforgiven.


To its credit, Black's admittedly speculative script keeps nudging into J. Edgar's secret heart. Did sublimated sexuality drive Hoover into megalomania? Annie registers what's going on between her son and Clyde. In a wrenching scene, she derides any hint of effeminate behavior ("I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil"). And DiCaprio and Hammer do wonders with mere suggestion, that is, when melodrama and old-age makeup allow for nuance. Even when the film trips on its tall ambitions, you can't shake it off.

'J. Edgar': Hoover's Life, in a Dramatic Vacuum By JOE MORGENSTERN
The Wall Street Journal

As the peerlessly powerful and widely feared director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the course of almost five decades, J. Edgar Hoover saw himself in a constant state of war—against radicals, gangsters, Communists and any politicians, including presidents, who tried to get in his way. "J. Edgar," with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is at war with itself, and everyone loses. Clint Eastwood's investigation of Hoover's life and tumultuous times seeks the cold facts behind the crime-fighter myths, the flesh-and-blood man behind the dour demeanor and the rumors of homosexuality. Yet Mr. Eastwood's ponderous direction, a clumsy script by Dustin Lance Black and ghastly slatherings of old-age makeup all conspire to put the story at an emotional and historical distance. It's a partially animated waxworks.



The production's internal conflict goes beyond style. "J. Edgar" is unsparing in its portrait of Hoover as a ruthless, self-dramatizing and sometimes delusional zealot—his loathing of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, among others, is given special prominence—as well as a patriot, by his own lights, and a proponent of modern criminal science. Mr. DiCaprio's approach is equally unsparing; the actor declines to spare himself. His Hoover is more to be censured than pitied, an obsessive-compulsive creep with the vocal rhythms of a ball-peen hammer and a gimlet-eyed gift for blackmail.


At the very same time, the movie offers a love story in which the hero struggles with his sexuality, and with his supposedly closeted love—if there was a closet it stayed tightly shut, so most of the script's sexual content is conjecture—for Clyde Tolson, the FBI agent who came to be known as Hoover's constant companion. He's played by Armie Hammer, who, exempt from the cartoonish constraints of Mr. DiCaprio's role, manages to make Tolson appealing and fitfully interesting.


In principle, biography should do what "J. Edgar" tries to do—reveal an inner life, whether or not the subject is outwardly appealing. There's a certain logic to Mr. Black's having done the screenplay; he won an Oscar for writing "Milk," in which Sean Penn portrayed the gay activist Harvey Milk. This time, though, his script, along with stodgy staging and Tom Stern's cheerless cinematography, yields scenes that cross the line from awkward to embarrassing—not because the lovers are gay, or getting to be long in the tooth, but because they're written and observed as mawkish relics, rather than passionate individuals who speak and behave in the idioms of their day. (In a scene that may be the movie's nadir, Clyde's face falls, while his lips literally quiver, when Edgar reveals that he's been to dinner several times with Dorothy Lamour, that they've "become physical," and that it may finally be time for a Mrs. Hoover.)


Although "J. Edgar" spares us the spectacle of a make-believe Lamour, it's studded with other vignettes and dubious representations of historical figures: a charm-free Ginger Rogers, a blank-slate Charles Lindbergh, a cloddish Robert F. Kennedy and an appallingly crude approximation of Richard Nixon. Perhaps the saddest spectacle, representing the worst waste of talent, is Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, Hoover's endlessly loyal private secretary. Ms. Watts is stuck with an opaque character, dreadful dialogue and, during the many sequences set in the twilight of Hoover's career, the sort of age makeup that should never deface as lovely a face as hers. Judi Dench fares slightly better as Annie Hoover, Edgar's mother. Annie may be a fire-breathing religious nut job, but at least the actress gets some fire to breathe.


Legendary power and its abuse always hold the potential for powerful drama; the trick is in the telling. This latest attempt to tell Hoover's story doesn't lack for ambition, only for expertise. Even if the personal side had been sharper and livelier, the historical side—partly satirical and partly objective—would have been ill-conceived. (Much of Hoover's career is explicated, tediously, through the device of him dictating salient details to an FBI biographer, and shown, confusingly, through the cracked prism of his self-inventions.) The script abounds in casual anachronisms—phrases like "fashion forward" and "a P.R. disaster"—and jumps back and forth in time without getting the feel of any period quite right. Fingerprints figured significantly in the bureau's evolution; at first Hoover called them finger patterns, or finger imprints. Whatever you want to call the ones that besmudge "J. Edgar," they're evidence of heavy hands.

‘J. Edgar’s’ Expert Actors Can’t Save Flawed Film

By Sheila Marikar, Nov 2011

Here’s the thing: It’s hard to follow a story when the people telling it look like Mr. Potato Head.



Petty as it may seem, that’s one of “J. Edgar’s” major problems. In an attempt to make the incredibly attractive actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer (“The Social Network”) look like the not-so-incredibly-attractive and much-older J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Hoover’s closest colleague and ambiguously gay life partner), director Clint Eastwood went heavy on the face putty and created a couple of bobble-headed characters that look like they belong in a JibJab cartoon, not an Oscar hopeful.


It’s a pity, because the story is compelling. Little is known about the personal life of Hoover, that unsung hero of American history who created the F.B.I. His ruthless quest to promote the agency (and his own public image) while eschewing a spouse, children and pretty much any kind of social life is Shakespearean.


As the younger Hoover, DiCaprio’s a wily charmer. Hammer brilliantly bats his eyelashes (and at one point, flies into a thrilling rage) as Hoover’s doe-eyed sidekick. It should come as a surprise to no one that these two are as endowed in the talent department as they are in the aesthetic arena.


Which makes it all the more disappointing when their performance gets squandered by tired movie-making techniques. They step into the elevator as old men, they emerge as young. Flash back, flash forward. Maybe it’s inevitable in a film that spans seven decades, but the back-and-forth gets old.


Naomi Watts, playing Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy, was spared the Age-ometer 3000. But like Hammer and DiCaprio, her best moments happen when she’s playing the younger version of her character. As Hoover’s strong-armed mom, Judi Dench inherits the Best Most Overbearing Mother of the Year award from “Black Swan’s” Barbara Hershey.


Like the limp green beans next to an overdone rib-eye, “J. Edgar’s” over-the-top accents make sense with the caked on makeup. The stand in for Robert Kennedy sounds like Bugs Bunny. Richard Nixon is similarly laughable.


Eastwood’s intentions were good. On execution, less would’ve been more.

J. Edgar, the Bad and the Good Warren Adler, Nov 26th 2011


After seeing Clint Eastwood's excellent biopic, J.Edgar, I was reminded of Mark Anthony's funeral oration in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."



With excellent reproductions of the era and the magnificent acting of Leonardo DiCaprio and a wonderful cast, Eastwood tells the story of J. Edgar Hoover, a sexually conflicted, complex, and single-minded man who was both extravagantly reviled and praised for founding, building and operating, with dictatorial efficiency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forging it into a powerful arm of the Federal Government.


DiCaprio portrays J. Edgar from a superb script by Dustin Lance Black, which encapsulates the man's life from childhood to death. He is portrayed with pitch-perfect, warts-and-all exactitude as someone obsessed with fervent and often bigoted patriotic zeal, driven to heroic fantasies, often deliberately fictionalized to enhance his image and spur recruitment of a coterie of educated and motivated men, who walked in cult-like lock step to Hoover's institutional and personal commands.


Sometimes painful to watch as DiCaprio peels away the man's reserve and humanizes him in ways smalls and large, we see unfolding the maturing of a man who grows progressively more paranoid and powerful as he grows older. We see the influence of a dominant, much loved mother and a relationship between two men, Hoover and his longtime companion and assistant, Clyde Tolson, that is tender, loving and affectionate, long before such relationships became acceptable in the popular culture. The relationship avoids the question of sexual consummation, although it is without question a sincerely loving one, beyond even the traditional elements of strong male bonding.


Eastwood, whose right-of-center credentials and reputed total command and control over story and every other detail of movie making, does not spare Hoover in assessing his willingness to sacrifice ethics and morality to the cause of building his beloved FBI.


He does not avoid accusations of Hoover using blackmail tactics to retain his power over presidents and others in the power structure, especially in sexual matters. He illustrates Hoover's propensity to fictionalize his personal exploits, glorifying service to the FBI and projecting and often exaggerating the image of G-men, a euphemism for his band of agents, as upright, brave, courageous and heroic, fighting for God and country. Young boys were recruited to think of themselves as junior G-men and working for the FBI was portrayed as one of the great careers open to educated and dedicated young men.


He takes us through the early days of crime fighting before and during the Depression and wrecking havoc on gangsters during prohibition. He is shown obsessed by the communists and radicals who are attempting what he believes is a takeover of the United States, a very real threat during and after World War II, and does not shy away from Hoover's wariness of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr. who he believed had radical motives, a position that did not win him many friends outside of the bureau and has, to some degree, diminished his reputation.


Still, the movie goes out of its way to make clear that he was not a racial bigot by using the device of having a black agent work with him on writing his memoirs, and the script calls for him to dub Senator McCarthy an "opportunist."


I lived in Washington for many years during Hoover's heyday. Seeing him and Tolson (a familiar pair) around town, and having met and befriended numerous FBI and ex-FBI men, my view about Hoover and the FBI he created is more or less the bottom line that I believe Eastwood intended when he created this movie. Having called Hoover to account for "the bad" with eagle-eyed accuracy, he weaves into the story what can only be counted as "the good."


Hoover was a motivational genius, a brilliant organizer who inspired loyalty and dedication from his underlings who worshiped him. Talk to any ex-FBI agent who worked on his watch and you will invariably get the same opinion. He established an FBI checking system that was as foolproof as possible to keep questionable people from serving in government, a system that, with some exceptions, was as thorough as possible and is still in operation today.


He established an FBI forensic capability second to none, and a fingerprinting system that is a crime fighting wonder. Yes, he was rigid, intolerant; often thin-skinned and egocentric. In his later years, the media pounded him with regularity, inspiring not only sharp criticism but outright hatred.


Some say he overstayed his office by years largely because he had the goods on those who made the decisions to keep him there. Maybe so.


But J.Edgar, the movie, is more than just a mere contrived biopic. There is something transcendent about it, something that can enhance our understanding about America and the people who wield power over our lives. It is worth the time to see it and ponder its lessons. Eastwood and his great cast have added some special insight into how a democracy blunders ahead, often with imperfect leaders who somehow rise above their flaws for the greater good of all of us.


'J. Edgar' Odd man out? Not exactly.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic, November 9, 2011
Drama. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Judi Dench. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (R. 135 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)


J. Edgar Hoover, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried, the man who blackmailed and terrified presidents - the man who, like Santa Claus, knew when you were sleeping (and whom with) - should have been a natural for a juicy big-screen biopic. But this latest from director Clint Eastwood is too ambiguous, too gentle and too noncommittal to get the job done.


It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous. This point of view might be summarized in this way: Sure, J. Edgar did some bad things, lots and lots of them ... but at least he was gay.


The screenplay, by Dustin Lance Black ("Milk"), puts Hoover's sexuality at the center of the film. This is not to say that we see Hoover having sex with his longtime friend, Clyde Tolson. In fact, the movie postulates that Hoover might have been celibate for his entire life. But it does suggest that Hoover's rigidity and paranoia, and all the actions resulting from those traits, had their origins in Hoover's repressed homosexuality.


Sorry, but that's too simple, and too boring, and it lets Hoover too much off the hook. Sure, it's mildly interesting to say that Hoover saw the world as dark and evil and teeming with hidden corruption, and that that's how he unconsciously saw himself. Thus, the theory goes, in trying to rid the world of hidden evils, he was actually trying to cure his own, when all he needed was to own his sexuality and accept himself, etc. ... But first, I don't buy it. And second, so what? Virtually every gay man of Hoover's generation was repressed, but only Hoover was wiretapping Jack Kennedy and sending crazy anonymous letters to Martin Luther King Jr..


Presenting the FBI director as essentially confused, conflicted and self-hating hinders Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Hoover. It tempts him into playing him frozen by a lack of self-knowledge. The old man is the same as the young man, driven by fear and haunted by the memory of a stern yet all-too-close mother (a scary Judi Dench).


But do we really believe that Hoover, who achieved such magnificent functionality, was never on to himself? That he never enjoyed being vindictive or relished power? The movie lavishes time on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which Hoover used to expand his jurisdiction. "J. Edgar" presents him as so clueless as to believe he's exploiting this entirely for the public's own good.


Yet even with a better script, DiCaprio might still have been lost. He is not a comfortable villain, and when he screws up his eyes to appear cold and unyielding, he just seems frightened. As an old man, he looks like Orson Welles as the elderly Charles Foster Kane, all age makeup and fake stiff gestures. And his mid-Atlantic accent is all over the map, almost as bad as Jeffrey Donovan's, whose brief appearance as Bobby Kennedy is the movie's nadir.


Perhaps when Hoover and Tolson kicked back together, in private, they really did talk about the fashion faux pas of 1930s celebrities. But next to the monumental questions raised by Hoover's life and career, such moments of gay bonding become unintentionally funny - or perhaps intentionally funny, which is even worse. Yet Armie Hammer as Tolson is, curiously enough, the film's best performance. Though he is undermined somewhat by his makeup in the later scenes - he looks like Boris Karloff in "The Mummy" - his sensitivity, watchfulness and sorrow are always believable.


Still, despite that and other virtues, it's hard not to see "J. Edgar" as a grand disappointment. As a libertarian, Eastwood was ideally positioned to explain what makes terrified men and their domestic spying so dangerous. After all, Hoover is someone that even Ron Paul and Nancy Pelosi could agree on. But Eastwood let his movie get sidetracked by sex, which proved too narrow a read on things.


Sometimes it really isn't all about sex.

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

By MANOHLA DARGIS, New York Times, Published: November 8, 2011


Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.



To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.


Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.


Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.


Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.


That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).


The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.


“J. Edgar” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and language.

'J. Edgar' gets a careful, competent screen analysis via Clint Eastwood
November 07, 2011

Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune Movie critic

In the 1959 film "The FBI Story," Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover — photographed from the rear, his face unseen — plays a younger cameo version of himself, speaking to G-men (James Stewart among them) about the newly formed agency and how its operation will remain free of all politics and the whims of any one presidential administration.



Hoover, following the Hoover-approved script, then expounds on the "love of justice." He says: "I warn you now. That is the most demanding of affections."



Make that the second-most demanding. For more than half a century, speculation regarding Hoover's private life has focused on whether this bulldog of all-American virtue knew an even more formidable affection — fraught with secrecy, given the times and Hoover's public profile, and wrapped in layers of emotional and sexual denial.


Director Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar," featuring a valiant performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, is a demure, rather touching inquiry into this possibility. Molded by the presence, and then the absence, of a smothering mother (Judi Dench) who at one point says she'd "rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," Hoover ran the FBI and amassed confidential, politically explosive files on a universe of dissidents and enemies from 1935 until his death in 1972. (Hoover also ran the comparatively toothless precursor to the FBI for more than a decade.) Did this power broker's longtime working friendship with assistant Clyde Tolson constitute the one great love of his life, sexually intimate or no?


Constructed as an elaborate interweave of flashbacks, starting with the Red Scare "Palmer raids" of 1919 and 1920, the movie poses many questions. But rarely does this central question relating to Hoover, Tolson and what was between them fade entirely.


In recent interviews for the film, Eastwood has done his best to dismiss his own biopic's inferences, saying among other things that the movie's not about "two gay guys." (Which sounds like the title of a new CBS sitcom.) All the same, the film's screenplay, from Oscar-winning "Milk" scribe Lance Dustin Black, is very much interested in Hoover's intimate relationship with Tolson, an Arrow Collar ad come to life in the hands of Armie Hammer. It is very much concerned with how Hoover's various facets coexisted in the same psyche: Hoover the closeted homosexual, Hoover the rustler of radicals and pinkos, Hoover the one-time paramour of Dorothy Lamour, (the film glances briefly on this), Hoover the martinet and blackmailer and mother's son.


Imagine how Oliver Stone might've handled this material (he got his own licks in with "Nixon," in which Bob Hoskins played Hoover as a sniveling wart hog of a bureaucrat), and whatever your mind's eye sees in terms of hysteria and aggressive visual technique, you'll get the opposite in Eastwood's dispassionate approach.


"J. Edgar" suggests, convincingly, that Hoover was in love and felt he couldn't do anything about it except spend as many meals and vacations and days and weeks and years with Tolson as he could manage. Tolson, screenwriter Black infers, was more willing to speak the love that dared not speak its name. We see, briefly, a hand-clasp in the back of a limousine. And in one startling and shrewdly staged hotel-room encounter, Tolson — fed up with Hoover's inability to come clean about his desires — turns on his superior, which leads to a fight, which leads to a single, angry kiss.


For much of the film Eastwood's studiously objective stance sets the tone for the story of a man whose misdeeds and hypocrisies are perhaps too discreetly handled. In the hotel room scene, however, as in the other "talking point" moment (involving the shaky old rumor about Hoover and cross-dressing), "J. Edgar" brings out the best in both DiCaprio and his director.



This may be a closety film about a closety character, but the tensions between Eastwood's direction and the script he's directing keep us off-guard in an intriguing way. The results, whatever one thinks of them, may be square, but they're all of a piece. Eastwood's house style remains very much in the house here. Cinematographer Tom Stern's hot, flat, chalky-white lighting pours into every interior, while Eastwood's self-penned musical score (a key theme borrowing the first three notes of Duke Ellington's "Solitude") stresses the tender side of its subject, at any cost.


J. Edgar By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, Wednesday, Nov 09, 2011

Anyone with strong opinions about founding FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is unlikely to come away satisfied by "J. Edgar," Clint Eastwood's ambitious, ultimately deflating portrait, which somehow manages to elide his worst abuses of power while making a burlesque of his personal vulnerabilities.



Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk") shrewdly organize "J. Edgar" around secrets - those that Hoover wielded in order to gain and keep power for an extraordinary 48 years at the bureau and those that he kept about his own intensely guarded private life. But because Hoover so adroitly avoided leaving any kind of paper trail, much of "J. Edgar" necessarily hinges on speculation and hearsay, especially regarding his intimate personal and professional relationship with Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.


His well-documented ruthless pursuit of civil rights leaders and other activists, on the other hand, is represented by a few billboard sequences that do little justice to the injustices he either perpetrated or ignored.


That "J. Edgar" suffers from such a structural weakness makes it all the more lamentable that the performance at its center is so strong. Leonardo DiCaprio, who despite attaining the ripe age of 36 still has trouble losing the boyish crackle in his voice, convincingly portrays the jowly bureaucrat from his days in the Justice Department during the Palmer Raids until his death in 1972. With the help of makeup, prosthetics, beady brown contact lenses and a wiry, wavy toupee, DiCaprio fully inhabits the man whose obsession with Bolshevik communism took root in 1919, when his boss at the Justice Department was almost killed by a bomb.


Urged on by his domineering mother, Annie (Judi Dench), and eventually aided in his mission by Tolson (Armie Hammer) and his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), Hoover outmaneuvered eight presidents and countless political enemies to become the ultimate Washington insider, rooting out crime and communism, manipulating the press and masterfully burnishing his own myth as the nation's most famous G-man. (One of "J. Edgar's" most fascinating insights is how he introduced such forensic tools as centralized fingerprint files and laboratory analysis to the bureau, rationalizing the agency he would come to deploy so irrationally.)


All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but "J. Edgar" instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea. As Hoover dictates his memoirs to a series of young agents, his hectoring drawl takes us back to his early years fighting gangsters and solving the Lindbergh kidnapping, while the central narrative traces his alliance with Tolson, portrayed by Hammer as an eager pup who agrees to be Hoover's No. 2 only if they will never miss a lunch or dinner together.


The tacit premise of "J. Edgar" is that, despite liaisons with Dorothy Lamour and Lela Rogers, Hoover was a closeted homosexual, unable to come to grips with his identity because of the suffocating control of his cruel, power-hungry mother. ("I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," she tells him.)


In one of several awkwardly staged scenes, after Annie's death, J. Edgar dons one of her dresses and a string of beads, apparently as a sop to audiences familiar with long-standing rumors of cross-dressing. But what the filmmakers clearly intend as a sympathetic portrayal of Hoover's tortured psyche instead gives him a troubling resemblance to Norman Bates. ("Yes, mother," Hoover wearily singsongs in "J. Edgar's" Oedipal leitmotif.)


There are other blips and slips: As persuasive as DiCaprio's performance is, Hammer never finds his footing as Tolson, who teeters on the verge of fey stereotype; his unsure portrayal isn't helped by the atrocious rubbery mask he wears in Tolson's later years. Supporting figures such as Robert F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon are played in wince-inducing impersonations that, in Nixon's case especially, play like crude "Saturday Night Live" outtakes; the tantalizing figure of Miss Gandy, who held all of Hoover's secrets, is never fleshed out (she's even denied the dignity of an end-credit postscript).


Eastwood's most fascinating narrative gambit comes late in the film, when Tolson boldly tells Hoover - and the audience - that the stories he's telling for the record didn't happen the way we just saw them play out. He didn't arrest the Lindbergh kidnapper or run down hoodlums with guns blazing.


But if "J. Edgar" suggests that he was his own most unreliable narrator, it still leaves viewers with a confounded sympathy, even gratitude, for the man. However alarming the comparison might be to Eastwood and his fans, the movie that "J. Edgar" brings most readily to mind may be Oliver Stone's "Nixon," which offered a similar psycho-biographical olive branch to its conflicted, controversial protagonist.


"Your child is sure and keeps this country safe," Miss Gandy tells the aging Hoover at one point. Eastwood would seem to agree, judiciously reminding viewers of Hoover's best intentions while choosing to relegate his most egregious missteps to the shadows (literally, when Hoover bugs and wiretaps a philandering Martin Luther King Jr.). The contradiction "J. Edgar" never confronts is that, for much of Hoover's tenure, untold numbers of Americans weren't safe, being routinely raped, kidnapped and lynched in a campaign of racist intimidation. Hoover chose not to investigate those crimes with his patented aggressive zeal, of course, choosing instead to ignore them in the name of fighting communism. During those years at least, he let the terrorists win.

J. Edgar

What did Hoover hide in his bureau drawers?
Release Date: 2011
By Roger Ebert, Nov 8, 2011


J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until he died in 1972; he added the word "Federal" to its title in 1935. Under the administrations of Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, he was, many believed, the second most powerful man in government. Now he has been dead for 39 years, and what most people probably think they know about him is that he liked to dress up like a woman. This snippet of gossip, which has never been verified, is joined by the details that he never married, lived with his mother until she died, and had a close, lifelong friendship with Clyde Tolson, the tall and handsome bachelor who inherited his estate.


It is therefore flatly stated that Hoover was gay, which would have been ironic since he gathered secret files on the sex lives of everyone prominent in public life and used that leverage to hold onto his job for 47 years and increase the FBI's power during every one of them. He was outspoken against homosexuality, and refused to allow gays (or many blacks, or any women) to become FBI agents. He was sure enough of his power that he sometimes held hands with Tolson in restaurants and shared rooms with him on vacations. There wasn't a president who could touch him.


Given these matters, and the additional fact that the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" was written by Dustin Lance Black, who wrote "Milk," you would assume the film was the portrait of a gay man. It is not. That makes it more fascinating. It is the portrait of the public image that J. Edgar Hoover maintained all his life, even in private. The chilling possibility is that with Hoover, what you saw was what you got. He was an unbending moralist who surrounded himself with FBI straight arrows. Those assigned closest to him tended to be good looking. Agents wore suits and ties at all times. He inspected their shoeshines. He liked to look but not touch.


In such famous cases as the capture of John Dillinger and the manhunt for the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, Hoover's publicity machine depicted him as acting virtually alone. He was not present when Dillinger was shot down outside the Biograph theater, but America got the impression that he was, and he never forgave the star agent, Melvin Purvis, for actually cornering the Most Wanted poster boy. Doubt persisted that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty in the Lindbergh case — but not in Hoover's mind. The fight against domestic communism in the years after World War II provided an ideal occasion for him to fan the Red Scare and work with the unsavory Joe McCarthy. Two of the reasons Hoover hated beatniks and hippies were their haircuts and shoeshines.


This man was closed down, his face a slab of petulance. He was so uncharismatic that it's possible to miss the brilliance of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in "J. Edgar." It is a fully realized, subtle, persuasive performance, not least in his scenes with Armie Hammer as Tolson. In my reading of the film, they were both repressed homosexuals, Hoover more than Tolson, but after love at first sight and a short but heady early courtship, they veered away from sex and began their lives as Longtime Companions. The rewards for arguably not being gay were too tempting for both men, who were wined and dined by Hollywood, Broadway, Washington and Wall Street. It was Hoover's militant anti-gay position that served as their beard.


Two women figured importantly in Hoover's life. One was his domineering mother, Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), who makes clear her scorn for men who are "daffodils." The other was a young woman named Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts). In an extraordinary moment of self-image control, Hoover concludes that it would be beneficial for him to have a wife. He asks Helen, an FBI secretary, out on one of the more unusual first dates in movie history; he demonstrates the workings of a card file system with great pride. It must have been clear to her that nothing was stirring in his netherlands. Their budding relationship segued smoothly into her becoming his confidential secretary for the rest of his life — the woman entrusted with the secret files.


Eastwood's film is firm in its refusal to cheapen and tarnish by inventing salacious scenes. I don't get the impression from "J. Edgar" that Eastwood particularly respected Hoover, but I do believe he respected his unyielding public facade. It is possibly Hoover's lifelong performance that fascinated him. There's a theme running through most of his films since "Bird" (1988): the man unshakably committed to his own idea of himself.


As a period biopic, "J. Edgar" is masterful. Few films span seven decades this comfortably. The sets, the props, the clothes, and details, look effortlessly right, and note how Eastwood handles the many supporting roles (some of them depicting famous people). These minor characters are all to some degree relating to Hoover's formidable public image. As a person or as a character, he was a star of stage, screen, radio and print; he was said to have the goods on everyone. People tip-toed around him as they might have with Stalin. It's a nice touch, the way Eastwood and DiCaprio create a character who seems to be a dead zone and make him electrifying in other actors' reaction shots.

Confusing 'J. Edgar' more sketch than portrait

By Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times

Clint Eastwood's new film "J. Edgar" tells the sprawling life story of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for almost 50 years. Told in flashbacks, the film is sometimes confusing and feels more like a rough draft than a proper sketch, according to Seattle Times film critic Moira Macdonald in this review. The film is playing at several theaters in Seattle.



Clint Eastwood's biopic "J. Edgar" wanders all over the 20th century and back again; it's a sprawling life story that seems both made for the movies and too big for them. J. Edgar Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (and its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation) for almost 50 years, beginning in the 1920s and continuing until his death in 1972. His career was filled with the kinds of public events that inspire their own movies — the Lindbergh baby kidnapping; the death of President John F. Kennedy — while his personal life was kept under wraps. He never married, lived with his mother until her death, employed the same personal secretary for almost his entire career and seemed to have no interests outside of his hawklike devotion to his work.



As portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, he was an exceedingly odd fellow: stodgy even as a young man, overly formal (he called his secretary "Miss Gandy" every day of their working life; she, when no one else was present, called him "Edgar"), paranoid, mumbly, and prone to getting even with people by instructing his staff, "I want you to start a file on him!" Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk") adds another layer, a theory long presented by some historians and disputed by others: Hoover was a closeted gay man, in love with his longtime second-in-command at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). The men were, unquestionably, devoted friends; no one knows if they were more than that, as Hoover and Tolson never told.


Black and Eastwood don't put the movie's emphasis on Hoover's personal life until its final act; rather, the movie is a meandering trip through his career, with a sort of greatest-hits approach. Its timeline is often confusing — Black frames it all with an older Hoover dictating his memoirs, resulting in a series of flashbacks not always in chronological order, and for which years are rarely given — and Eastwood's attention to detail isn't at its usual level. Why, for example, is DiCaprio's old-age makeup so convincing (though he does look distractingly like Jack Nicholson) and Hammer's so artificial-looking? Why are so many of the interiors almost comically dark? Why is the secretary, played by Naomi Watts, given so little screen time?


Though "J. Edgar" definitely isn't Eastwood's best, as in all of the director's films there are wonderful moments for the actors: Hammer, his voice smooth as new velvet as he advises Hoover on fashion; Josh Lucas, wonderfully relaxed as he strides through the film as Charles Lindbergh; DiCaprio, demonstrating the young Hoover's awkward eagerness on a date with Watts' character at the Library of Congress (he's thrilled by the organization of the card catalog); and standing alone, not letting himself tremble, as Tolson walks out the door after a fight. But "J. Edgar" too often feels like the rough draft of the great movie it could have been; a character sketch, not quite a portrait.

J. Edgar

By Peter Debruge, Variety, Thu., Nov. 3, 2011
J. Edgar Hoover's mystique lies in the fact that while he kept meticulous files with compromising details on some of America's most powerful figures, nobody knew the man's own secrets. Therefore, any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau's exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it -- a dilemma "J. Edgar" never rises above. With Leonardo DiCaprio bringing empathy to the controversial Washington power-monger, Clint Eastwood's old-school biopic should do solid midrange business.



In 1993, Anthony Summers published a tawdry expose titled "Official and Confidential, the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," which aired Susan Rosenstiel's claim that she had witnessed Hoover, a lifelong bachelor who was seldom seen without trusted deputy Clyde Tolson, wearing a cocktail dress at a gay orgy in New York. Though never corroborated, the claim stuck, and the legacy of this much-feared public figure -- who served as FBI director under eight presidents, across 48 years and through some of the most trying cases of the 20th century -- is now dominated by associations with cross-dressing.


If the assumptions about his sex life are true, that would make "J. Edgar" the story of the highest-ranking homosexual in American history, produced by a major Hollywood studio and directed by one of the industry's most venerable directors -- hardly insignificant in an industry that goes to great lengths to obfuscate the sexuality of its own stars. While not exactly coy, Eastwood's classically styled look at Hoover's life takes a long time to arrive at questions of the character's proclivities. When it does get there, however, this new dimension of the character so enlivens what has been a mostly dry portrayal of one man's crusade to reform law enforcement that it becomes the pic's focus.


True to Eastwood's understated nature, "J. Edgar" offers the "tasteful" treatment of such potentially salacious subject matter, though a more outre Oliver Stone-like approach might have made for a livelier film. With the exception of a few profanities (enough to land the pic an audience-limiting R rating) and a lone homoerotic wrestling scene so tame that Ken Russell's "Women in Love" feels like an X by comparison, the film could pass for something Warners would have released in an earlier era -- earlier even than many of the events depicted onscreen, as suggested by Tom Stern's cinematography, desaturated nearly to black-and-white.


Eastwood's restraint applies to not only the kid-gloves depiction of how Hoover slyly manipulated politicos and press, including a loathsome attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into declining the Nobel Peace Prize, but also to his oddly nonjudgmental approach to Hoover's sexual identity, depicting him as a man too Puritanical to pursue intimacy with someone of either gender.


As he did with "Milk," screenwriter Dustin Lance Black follows the print-the-legend philosophy, building to what could have been the ultimate tragic love story between two men: Johnny and Clyde (as Truman Capote dubbed Hoover and Tolson), companions for the better part of five decades who never had the chance to express their affection -- a consequence of Hoover's insistence that FBI employees live up to the strictest code of conduct (he wouldn't even allow them to drink coffee on the job).


The opening reel establishes both the scope of the story, which ranges from Hoover's 20s to his final days overseeing the FBI at age 77, and DiCaprio's remarkable ability to play the character at any point along that timeline. Aided by a convincing combination of facial appliances, makeup and wigs, the thesp draws auds past that gimmick and into the character within a matter of a few scenes. There's an innate kindliness to DiCaprio that makes for a more likable protagonist than Hoover as the tempestuous monster so many biographers describe, which is good news for the film's commercial prospects but seemingly at odds with reality.


Surely this can't be the glory hound who collaborated with Sen. Joseph McCarthy on his anti-communist witch hunt and called King "the most notorious liar in the country," nor the same FBI chief accused of racism (the Bureau antagonized civil-rights leaders and employed few blacks), homophobia (gays were dismissed from service) and sexism (women were allowed to serve as secretaries and assistants, but never agents).


Rather than seriously engaging with any of these common accusations, Black's script skips back and forth through Hoover's CV, alternating public grandstanding with invented insights into his private life. Annie Hoover (Judi Dench) exerts enormous control over her son's personality, telling him, "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son," in the film's most chilling scene. Tolson (Armie Hammer), whose prissiness accounts for the film's scant laughs, also surfaces early, lurking behind the frosted-glass door to an adjoining office while Hoover dictates a self-aggrandizing book.


Considering how critical any other character's perspective might be, allowing Hoover to narrate his own story comes as a generous gift from Black. Hoover's voiceover gives form to a story that starts out as an institutionally approved version of how the FBI came to be, punctuated every so often by a high-profile arrest or newfangled forensic development (an investigation into the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's son supplies the sort of procedural intrigue that comes comfortably to Eastwood). As the pic progresses, however, Hoover's words grow increasingly defensive, and the episodes drift into far more personal territory.


Since you can't put a face on the love interest in a workaholic's story, Black must manufacture romance on the margins. In the first act, Hoover briefly courts Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), an office girl who declines his marriage proposal on their third date, but agrees to become his secretary. A short time later, Hoover meets Tolson in a scene staged to suggest love at first sight.


As written, Tolson's character is clearly gay, but Eastwood seems noncommittal about Hoover. Certainly there are clues in nearly every aspect of the production, from Deborah Hopper's ever-dapper wardrobe to the meticulously appointed sets overseen by James Murakami and decorated by Gary Fettis. At one point, auds catch a glimpse of the entry stairwell to Hoover's home, where a framed portrait of his mother hangs alone. What's missing from this picture? Why, the famous nude photo of Marilyn Monroe that hung in the real-life Hoover's hallway.


Camera (Technicolor/B&W, Panavision widescreen), Tom Stern; editors, Joel Cox, Gary D. Roach; music, Eastwood; production designer, James Murakami; supervising art director, Patrick M. Sullivan; art director, Greg Berry; set decorator, Gary Fettis; costume designer, Deborah Hopper; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/Datasat), Jose Antonio Garcia; supervising sound editors, Alan Robert Murray; re-recording mixers, John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff; special effects supervisor, Steven Riley; visual effects supervisor, Michael Owens; visual effects, Method Studios Vancouver, Lola Visual Effects; stunt coordinator, Buddy Van Horn; assistant director, David M. Bernstein; casting, Fiona Weir. Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Nov. 2, 2011. (In AFI Film Festival -- opener.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

Entertainment Weekly,
J. Edgar Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Nov 16, 2011

Leonardo DiCaprio has given many fine performances, but he has often seemed trapped in a certain preternatural matinee-idol youthfulness. Whether in a brooding period piece like Gangs of New York or a pop head-game like Inception, he inevitably comes off as lean and lithe and eager, with that movie-star-as-lion-cub face. I thought that quality really hampered him in The Aviator, where he lacked even a trace of Howard Hughes' rugged gravitas; he seemed like a boy playing a man. So I was skeptical of how well he would do in the role of that stocky, ruthless bulldog J. Edgar Hoover, the most famous director — in many ways, the inventor — of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But in Clint Eastwood's emotionally reticent yet absorbing J. Edgar, DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.



The first thing you notice about DiCaprio's John Edgar Hoover is that he speaks in one of those jarringly proper early-20th-century Brahmin accents. It takes a bit of getting used to, but DiCaprio makes the dialect work, and it keys us to Hoover's rather rigid interior life. Even when he's young, Edgar, as he's known to those closest to him, is starchy and furrowed, with eyebrows scrunched down low (he looks a bit like the Dick Tracy villain Flattop). DiCaprio gives him a gleam of suspicion and a stately, formal body language that will harden, over time, into a combative waddle. Written by Dustin Lance Black (Milk), the movie cuts back and forth between the '20s and '30s, when Hoover built the FBI and planted it in the popular imagination, and the early '60s, when his methods began to congeal into something paranoid and deluded. The crosscutting, frankly, is a bit much; the film never quite finds a present tense. Yet Black's script is densely detailed and fascinating. Eastwood, forsaking his deliberate rhythms for something speedier and wordier, turns J. Edgar into a dramatic essay about how the law and repression, heroism and corruption, fused in Hoover.


It's in 1919 that a 24-year-old Hoover first glimpses what he sees as the basic threat to American life: bomb-planting Communist agitators. As the film presents it, he may be right about the dangers of anarchy. But the subversives he's driven to crack down on also offend something fundamental in his nature. He's not just devoted to law and order. He craves control. From the outset, he has an epic plan: to make the methods of Sherlock Holmes bureaucratic. He collects forensic evidence (at this point, the authorities throw away the majority of crime-scene clues), hiring oddball experts like a man who knows everything about grains of wood. And he dreams of a centralized database devoted to the bold new science of fingerprinting.


He's inventing modern law enforcement, and he has triumphs, like hunting down the kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh's baby. Yet there's a hidden madness to Hoover's method. He still lives with his mother (Judi Dench), and his devotion to her has a touch of Norman Bates. On a date with the comely Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he shows off the card-catalog system he created for the Library of Congress. Is it any wonder that she becomes not his lover but his secretary? And when Hoover interviews a strapping prospective agent named Clyde Tolson, sweat trembles on his upper lip. He may be trying to rein in more than Communism.


The closest the movie comes to having an emotional center is Hoover's relationship with Tolson (played with soft sympathy by The Social Network's Armie Hammer), who becomes his friend, right-hand man, and dinner companion. As the film presents it, the two experience a love that can't be acted upon, that can't even speak its name. That's Hoover's tragedy — but it is also, in J. Edgar, his pathology. His obsession with secrecy, with using illegal wiretaps to keep private files on politicians (like JFK) for the implicit threat of blackmailing them, emerges out of his hidden sense of shame. Over time, Hoover's enemies shift: from the lefties of the '20s to the gangsters of the '30s and, finally, to the social-protest leaders of the '60s like Martin Luther King Jr., whom he sees as an enemy of the state. Hoover never changes. Instead, he blinds himself to how America changes. Yet his angry paranoia isn't exactly something that you can identify with. I was held by J. Edgar, but it's a movie — like the man at its center — with a buried heart.

J. Edgar By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

November 9, 2011
Leonardo DiCaprio's darkly fascinating performance as J. Edgar Hoover is matched by director Clint Eastwood's deft work behind the camera.


"J. Edgar" is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?



This brooding, shadow-drenched melodrama with strong political overtones examines the public and private lives of a strange, tortured man who had a phenomenal will to power. A man with the keenest instincts for manipulating the levers of government, he headed the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Though in theory he served eight presidents, in practice J. Edgar Hoover served only himself.


Starring an impressive Leonardo DiCaprio and crafted with Clint Eastwood's usual impeccable professionalism, "J. Edgar" gets its power from the way the director's traditional filmmaking style interacts with the revisionist thrust of Dustin Lance Black's script.


This film's J. Edgar is not the patriotic anti-Communist stalwart Hoover considered himself to be, but rather someone who only imagined he was the hero of the story, someone who went from outcast to oppressor by not hesitating to ride roughshod over and even blackmail whoever got in his way. Absolute power truly corrupted him absolutely. The overriding irony of this situation was that this man, as rigid and self-righteous as any of the Soviet commissars he feared and fought against, apparently had an unacknowledged private life that gives his story unexpected poignancy but would have made him a target of his own investigations had it been lived by someone else.


Shot in a Stygian gloom by veteran Eastwood collaborator Tom Stern, "J. Edgar" uses a news-behind-the-news structure reminiscent of "Citizen Kane" as it goes back and forth between Hoover's earliest days and the law unto himself he eventually became. Packed with information, the film does more than ask the Shakespearean question, "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?" It takes its two-hour, 17-minute length to show us in detail how it all came down.


In this "J. Edgar" benefits from the convincing acting of key cast members, including Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, the great man's confidential secretary, and Armie Hammer (the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network") as Hoover's soul mate, Clyde Tolson. Most of all it benefits from DiCaprio, who spent hours on set being aged from 24 to 77, had almost 80 costume changes, and has the presence and force to make this American gargoyle believable.


It's the graying Hoover we meet first, dictating his somewhat suspect memoir to a series of young agent-stenographers because he feels that "it's time this generation learned my side of the story."


That story begins with a rarely examined event in American history, the 1919 Palmer raids against anarchists and other supposed radicals. In response to a series of bombings, U.S. Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer in effect took the law into his own hands, collaborating with the 24-year-old Hoover and the newly formed FBI to attack people for their ideas without evidence of crimes. It's the first of several examples we see in the film of what can happen when unchecked governmental power falls into the hands of the ruthless and the self-righteous, when influential people believe, as Hoover did, that "sometimes you need to bend the rules a little to keep our country safe."


According to the film, Hoover's character was influenced as much by his part in the raids as it was by the personality of Annie Hoover (Judi Dench), his dragon-lady mother. Dominant, smothering and oddly reminiscent of Tony Perkins' mother in "Psycho," Mrs. Hoover's homophobic insistence that "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil" had a stifling effect on the other major relationship in J. Edgar's life, his close friendship with FBI colleague Tolson.


A smooth fashion plate with the manners and attitude of the born courtier, the handsome Tolson catches Hoover's eye and before you can say "constant companion," the two men are having lunch together every day and even taking joint vacations.


The exact nature of this relationship, as well as Hoover's sexuality — did he wear dresses, as has been claimed, or didn't he? — have been the source of near-endless speculation; at this point in time, the truth is unknowable. Black's persuasive script posits that the men definitely had strong feelings for each other but that Hoover, at least, could not even acknowledge, let alone act on them because of his mother's inflexible attitude. This was literally the love that dared not speak its name.


"J. Edgar" carefully takes us through the stages of Hoover's career, including his realizing the publicity value of going toe-to-toe with gangsters and the way he used the distinctly outré circumstances of the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg's infant son to advance the bureau's status.


We see the good things about Hoover, for instance his championing of scientific crime-scene analysis and the use of fingerprints, but we see much more of the dark pathological side, his mania for collecting incriminating evidence on people such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., whom he considered the most dangerous man in America.


"We must never forget our history," Hoover was fond of saying. "We must never lower our guard." But "J. Edgar" is best taken as a warning that in focusing too heavily on outside subversive agitators, we run the risk of ignoring the depredations of people very much like Hoover himself.