Movie Review - J. Edgar

J. Edgar (2011)

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Josh Lucas, and Judi Dench

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Oh, Clint Eastwood.  I'm gonna call you "Old Reliable" now seeing as how I can always count on your movies to be a total and utter bore.  J. Edgar lived up to that lofty (or lowly) expectation.  While it was perhaps slightly more interesting than Hereafter and Invictus thanks to its subject matter alone, Eastwood's flick just feels dark and heavy at every single turn from the acting to the brooding set design to the uninspired stuffy direction.  Somehow, though, despite the hefty feel of everything in the flick, there's an utter emptiness in terms of dramatic tension.

The saving grace of the film is that Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black jump back and forth through time to various stages of the FBI creator J. Edgar Hoover's career and there's at least a bit of fun trying to pinpoint where in the timeline we are based off of the make-up caked onto Leonardo DiCaprio.  (It should be noted that a couple reviews I read panned the make-up in this flick, but I thought it was fine and sometimes quite good.)  However, the remainder of the flick's story much of which is composed of a ridiculously written romance between Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his secret paramour Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) plays out like a silly soap opera complete with a hotel room slapfest (that ends in a smooch on the lips) with the requisite throwing of a glass against a wall followed by shouted sayings like "How dare you! But don't leave me!  I love you!"  

Hoover was a helluva guy.  Overly ambitious it seems, but strongly believing that everything he did (whether it be wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hotel room sexcapades or claiming to have scoop on Communist ties to Eleanor Roosevelt) was done in order to strengthen his position and the FBI's position in the government.  Sure, on one hand he was attempting to overthrow radicals in the country, but on the other hand he was becoming that dictatorial presence that he so despised.  Add the cross-dressing (which is only lightly touched upon and done so in a rather horrifying Norman Bates-ish Psycho manner) and the gay aspect of the guy and there's gotta be a good story there.  It's just not present in the movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio was fine (although oddly uncharismatic) and did a pretty darn good job at creating six decades of a character through changes in movement and speech.  Naomi Watts was adequate in what amounted to a very plain role as Hoover's longtime loyal secretary Helen Gandy.  Her character was in the film quite a bit, but wasn't given a whole lot else to do beyond saying, "Yes, sir," which just ends up wasting many minutes of the 140-minute runtime.  Still, DiCaprio and Watts were the two bright spots here.  Armie Hammer (whose role in The Social Network landed him in spot #5 on last year's Breakthrough Star RyMickey Awards) was overacting quite a bit, playing his role of Hoover's gay confidante Clyde Tolson with never a smidgeon of believability.  The screenplay does him no favors as it makes Clyde love fashion and dress impeccably (not that those are necessarily inherent characteristics of a gay man, but the way the movie plays them up it most certainly is intended to be that way).  And let's not even get started on Judi Dench who seemed to be sleepwalking through this thing as Hoover's overbearing mother -- another role in which the screenplay does no favors to the actor playing the part.

The personal life of J. Edgar Hoover admittedly isn't all that well-documented so who really knows if he was gay or a cross-dresser.  The problem is that J. Edgar skirts around these issues incredibly awkwardly and while it takes stands (to a degree) as to whether these rumors were true, it never attacks them head-on and it creates a lack of drama because of that.  

The RyMickey Rating:  D+