J Edgar
Clint Eastwood (2011)
The odd couple here is not Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio – only a matter of time before these two bêtes noires of mine joined forces – but the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and J Edgar Hoover. But maybe not so odd. The protagonist and hero of Black’s previous screenplay, Harvey Milk, became a public figure because of the homosexuality that he publicly asserted. Hoover, according to this film, was a public figure who continued to repress his sexual orientation. It’s not hard to understand Black’s interest in exploring the life and personality of a man who had at least one major thing in common with Milk but was, in most respects, his polar opposite. It was a limitation of Milk that Black and Gus Van Sant made Harvey Milk absolutely heroic – although you didn’t experience the film as limited because the story was strong, the characters mostly appealing, and Sean Penn’s portrait of Milk so rich. This project involves a greater challenge because Black, unsurprisingly, is antipathetic to the politics and personality of J Edgar Hoover. There’s no suggestion of sympathy for Hoover’s predicament, even though disguising homosexuality was standard practice in, for example, Hollywood throughout the many years that he led the FBI (perhaps it still is); even though Hoover, in his line of work, could hardly have come out, were he ever so liberal. The film doesn’t explore either the nature of Hoover’s sexuality or how much he was able or willing to understand it. It’s love at first sight when Hoover (DiCaprio) meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the man who becomes his lifelong partner at work and outside it, but did Hoover ever like the look of other men? There’s no hint that he did. (A similar question surrounds the character of Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain but with a difference. Miles away from any other human being, Ennis and Jack Twist are already thrown together in an extraordinary way: you can accept that the experience of their nights on the mountain takes Ennis by surprise, is unforgettable and definitive.)
Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay is no more shapely than it’s penetrating. There’s a load of voiceover in the narrative – justified by Hoover’s apparently dictating his memoirs to one of his agents in the FBI (then to this agent’s replacement). The scenes that don’t feature Hoover are so few they give the impression that Black has temporarily forgotten the framework for his story. But Eastwood and DiCaprio go beyond the shortcomings of the script: the actor makes Hoover an uninteresting person; the director renders tired and secondhand the amazing series of political events and social changes that occurred during his thirty-two year tenure of the top job at the FBI. I guess I’ve heard Hoover’s voice a few times over the years; I can’t bring it to mind but I’ll assume Leonardo DiCaprio gets it right enough. He’s so focused on getting it right, though, that approximation is all: there’s no expression in the voice, let alone any variation across the years – the carefully metronomic delivery may be meant to reflect Hoover’s unyielding control of his inner feelings and/or his blinkered mind but it would be easier to think there was more than meets the ear if DiCaprio had been worth listening to before. Watching Rory Kinnear as the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle in the BBC adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood last week, I was very impressed by his skill in creating a coherent character who, nevertheless, behaved differently with different people (as most people do in life, if not on screen). This is beyond DiCaprio. He’s so locked into the idea of a political bigot who can’t or won’t express the rest of his personality that his J Edgar Hoover is baffling (but not mysterious). We get no sense – not least because DiCaprio has no authority – of how Hoover was viewed by the generations of FBI men who worked for him, or of why Clyde Tolson was attracted to him (beyond his having the looks of Leonardo DiCaprio), or of the complexity of Hoover’s relationship with his dominating mother. One of DiCaprio’s limitations is an inability to bring to life the particular intelligence of the character he’s playing so the casting of Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother seems not just genetically improbable but an almost cruel joke (and, incidentally, Rory Kinnear in Edwin Drood made the relationship between Septimus Crisparkle and his mother (Julia McKenzie) especially truthful and convincing). In fact, Judi Dench, although she’s the most vivid and individual thing in J Edgar, isn’t at her best and has a faintly negligent air. (Her negligent attitude towards an American accent is explained, I assume, by the fact that Anna-Marie Hoover was of German-Swiss descent.)
When Hoover’s mother dies, her tearful son gets a necklace out of her jewel box and puts it round his own neck. He fondles one of her old dresses then gets into it. Ah, the wages of being too close to your mother and not owning up to your homosexuality! According to Wikipedia, Hoover was rumoured to go in for cross-dressing but Dustin Lance Black should still be ashamed of this scene, assuming that he, rather than Eastwood, is responsible for its conception. For a few moments, J Edgar looks to be heading into Psycho territory – although no one is going to mistake Clint Eastwood for Alfred Hitchcock: Hoover ashamedly wrenches the necklace off and the sequence climaxes with the cliché of beads scattering across a floor. The dialogue is poor throughout. It’s almost impossible to believe that the stilted exchanges between Hoover and Clyde Tolson were written by the person who wrote the scenes between Harvey Milk and his partner Scott Smith. When Hoover asks his faithful secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) to get out the FBI file on ‘the President’s wife’, she replies ‘Mrs Roosevelt?’ Shortly after she starts work at the Justice Department, Hoover takes Helen to the Library of Congress and shows her the card catalogue system he’s devised (a list of suspected radicals). This would-you-like-to-see-my-etchings moment is followed by a proposal of marriage. Stupefied by the suggestion, Helen turns him down explaining that ‘My career comes first’ – and she’s as good as her word: she continues as his personal secretary for just about the next half century. This relationship is too bizarre not to be true and Naomi Watts does what she can with Helen but the whole thing plays like a joke. Hoover attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King into not accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and, even when he turns on the television to watch a broadcast of the ceremony in Stockholm, still seems confident that King will decline. You get no sense of the strength of Hoover’s delusion about this and his reaction to King’s accepting the award is little more than petulance. Whatever you think of J Edgar Hoover, it’s hard to believe he didn’t have abilities greater than Black and Eastwood are willing to allow him. They describe Hoover merely as a dishonest fool: he won’t admit either his sexuality or his own part in making high-profile arrests, like that of Bruno Hauptmann (Damon Herriman) for the kidnap of the Lindbergh baby.
The several Lindbergh sequences are flat-footed and Clint Eastwood delivers one-off episodes like the assassination of JFK as if he were checking things off a list. As usual in his movies, the scenes lack rhythm, except where the actors create one independently, and that rarely happens here. Dermot Mulroney is good in the minute role of a clear-minded cop on the Lindbergh case and Armie Hammer is very good in his early scenes as Clyde Tolson: you can see why the congenitally awkward Hoover is taken with Tolson’s social ease and suave good manners. In private, Hammer’s Tolson has a femininity (as much as an effeminacy) that is expertly cloaked when he’s in the outside world. But the script is so poor there’s nowhere for Hammer to go and his old man’s make-up is bad. Leonardo DiCaprio deserves credit for being more sympathetic towards Hoover than Black and Eastwood are. He’s really trying in this film: his characterisation isn’t imaginative but it’s rigorously consistent – it establishes and sustains the tone of J Edgar, albeit this is an acrid, hollow monotone. There are a few moments when, as the older Hoover, encased in prosthetic, you see the odd spark of individuality and get a sense that the mask of heavy make-up is freeing DiCaprio as an actor. But what it frees him to express is still not much.
24 January 2012