The darkness needs no added emphasis.
Director
Clint Eastwood loves a challenge and he took on a zinger when he decided to make
J. Edgar. The vain and powerful FBI director was not the heroic gangbuster
of legend, and Eastwood's task was complex.
In 1919, J.
Edgar Hoover is hired to run the anti-radical division of the fledging FBI. The
man who will build and control the bureau for nearly five decades steps on board
with a strange mix of ambition, ability, and paranoia. Socially tense and
willingly in thrall to his mother (Judi Dench), the young Hoover proposes
awkwardly to a girl from the typing pool who refuses him but becomes his
secretary and protector for life. She is Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts.)
Hoover's role
in designing the innovative card catalogue system at the Library of Congress
serves him well in developing the fabled fingerprint analysis system that will
serve as a centralized data bank for law enforcement. He focuses on killing the
bank robbers and gangsters of his day: Dillinger, Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson,
Machine Gun Kelly, and indulges in an orgy of self-promotion that glamorizes the
bureau as "Hoover's G-men."
Clyde Tolson
(Armie Hammer) fits Hoover's stringently conservative employee profile perfectly
and becomes his second in command as well as his constant companion. As Hoover
becomes obsessed with communists - whose power he vastly overestimates - he
expands the bureau's surveillance capability to the private lives of public
figures - Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King,
and journalists.
By this time,
it's hard not to agree with Charles Lindbergh who called Hoover "a fussy little
man" and refused to shake his hand, or with Clyde Tolson's analysis that Hoover
wanted "our country's lasting adoration." This is a man so powerful that he
blackmails incumbent presidents to secure tenure for himself, a man so
conflicted that he struggles to contain his own homosexuality while condemning
it in others, a man unable to resolve any personal relationships.
So how
successful is director Clint Eastwood in telling the excessively unpleasant
story of this exceptionally unpleasant man? The make-up people did their job
well for Leonardo diCaprio, but it is diCaprio the actor who inhabits a man who
ages over the decades without ever overcoming the paranoid stew of his rage and
ambition. Though he resists the path of easy editorializing, Eastwood wraps the
story in unnecessary melodramatic lighting and music when the darkness needs no
extra emphasis. Unfortunately a heavy load of information leads to a fragmented
picture.
Over the
years, Clint Eastwood has earned the public trust. Because the various
distasteful revelations here have been documented elsewhere by reliable sources,
his movie is probably accurate. It is also a powerful reminder of the degree to
which power can accrue to a man who gathers and uses material illegally in order
to hunt his prey and keep presidents in line. Beware, future presidents, of who
you choose to head the FBI.
Copyright (c) Illusion