J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, dominated American society for almost 50 years, but, for all his love of publicity, he was essentially a back room operator.
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Geoff Pierson.
Rating: (M)
Three stars (out of five)
Watching him build, then defend, his fiefdom through blackmail and intimidation is hardly a sure-fire way to encourage sympathy.
Director Clint Eastwood has a tricky task covering a long life full of incident and he never really seems in control of the material.
J. Edgar (Rialto) opens with the elderly Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) dictating his memoirs, which is the cue to start flashing back and forth over his career with gay abandonment.
All those jump cuts may be fun in the editing suite but they wear the audience out.
Several times I heard the tell-tale murmur of the audience turning to one another asking "who is that?".
I came away thinking that Hoover was paranoid and self-important, which is pretty much what I thought before I went in, but I was also surprised that his law enforcement triumphs seemed to amount to so little.
Hoover was proud of his arrest record, but history remembers him as the guy who taped the Kennedy brothers' sex lives.
This film does nothing to give a us a deeper comprehension of the man.
Best thing: For all its faults it remains watchable because Leonardo DiCaprio is so good.
Worst thing: J. Edgar tries to have it's cake and eat it too. We see him at his most corrupt, but are expected to have sympathy because of his repressed sexuality.
See it with: A professor of American history or a smartphone to google all those once-were household names. Seriously, this film should come with its own footnotes.
- Christine Powley
