J. Edgar (2011)

If there’s one thing that separates the great biopics from the mediocre, it’s that the great ones try to use their subject’s life story for the purpose of exploring larger, universal themes that will resonate with modern audiences. If a biopic fails, it’s usually because it feels like little more than the dramatization of a list of bullet points. Unfortunately, the latter is the case with Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, a handsome but woefully unfocused trip through the life of a potentially fascinating character that never actually seems all that fascinating. It tells you a great deal about the important events in J. Edgar Hoover’s life, but not much of anything with regards to who he was as a person. Here is a wannabe prestige picture that looks like a great film and at times feels like one, but underneath that stuffy exterior is a movie that fails utterly as a compelling drama. J. Edgar has a lot of history to cover, and the film suffers due to the desire to touch on as much of it as possible.

The eponymous figure is portrayed here by Leonardo DiCaprio, who dons all kinds of aging makeup in order to cover Hoover’s entire life span. The film then jumps randomly throughout history, showing us the most important moments in Hoover’s life in no particular order. At one point, he becomes director of the FBI. At another, he meets and begins a (mild) relationship with his right hand man Clyde Toldon (Armie Hammer). Other moments include the hunt for Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped child, his reorganization of the Library of Congress, and the advent of forensic science. All the while, Hooever tries desperately to win the approval of his mother (Judi Dench), who frowns upon her son’s unwillingness to find a bride. J. Edgar brings all of this up, but never really delves past the surface on any of them. It introduces each item, briefly summarizes its impact on Hoover’s life, and then moves on to something else.

What’s equally frustrating is that most of this project just seems like an empty attempt at fooling the Academy into handing Eastwood and DiCaprio an Oscar. While they were clearly interested in what they were making, much of J. Edgar has a frustratingly needy feel to it. DiCaprio’s performance is solid but never spectacular, and it more or less goes through the Citizen Kane checklist of How to Win Critical Acclaim. Like the movie itself, DiCaprio has all the basics of the Hoover character down, but there’s never a sense that he completely inhabited the character. He isn’t bad, but unlike, say, Sean Penn in Milk, he never wholly becomes J. Edgar Hoover. When I watched Milk, I never for a second thought I was watching Sean Penn. When I was watching J. Edgar, I was always cognizant that I was watching Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover. In many ways, his costar Hammer’s work is far more effective. He simply performs what is asked of him and makes Tolson seem like an actual human being rather than one that only exists in the movies. (Or the “pictures,” as they likely called them back then.) DiCaprio’s Hoover seems more like a performance.

Therein lies what’s most problematic about the film as a whole: nothing feels remotely of this Earth or like it has any consequence. It exists inside this fake Hollywood world where everything is shot through a gray filter and old people look like young people with really heavy make-up. It cares more about the history than the people; what happened in Hoover’s life as opposed to how it affected him and whether it really mattered. The result is frustratingly scattershot. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black—who actually wrote Milk­—errs by a) not questioning his subject enough, and b) approaching the more “controversial” subjects in not very interesting or impactful ways. What Hoover accomplished is something that has impacted the country to this very day, but J. Edgar feels too much like a period piece with little modern relevance. It works reasonably well as a textbook, but that does not make for engrossing art.

As a contrast, look at David Fincher’s The Social Network. Instead of making a movie about the entirety of Mark Zuckerberg’s life, it focused on the single stretch of time in which he started Facebook, made a crap-ton of money, and angered his best friend and two muscular rowers in the process. By focusing on that and that alone, the film had far more impact. Far less interesting is the movie which could be made 70 years from now, which jumps through various important moments in Zuckerberg’s life and only giving each about five minutes of screen time. That is the great flaw of J. Edgar. You can see about 7 Social Network-type movies in here, but instead it only takes the broad strokes and throws them into a single, prestige-y package. Had the film focused on a single, pivotal period in Hoover’s life, I might have left the theater feeling like I understood the man, for better or for worse. Right now, I feel as if I might get a ‘B’ on a quiz.

Grade: C