FILM FRENZY

Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar (Photo: Fox)

By Matt Brunson

(This feature is part of a rotating series that digs into the past and uncovers a movie as follows: Two-Star Tuesday for a movie that earns either two or two-and-a-half stars; One-Star Wednesday for a movie that earns either one or one-and-a-half stars; Three-Star Thursday for a movie that earns either three or three-and-a-half stars; and Four-Star Friday for a movie that earns four stars.)

J. EDGAR (2011)
★★ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Clint Eastwood
STARS Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer

No one could possibly have fathomed that someone as handsome as Leonardo DiCaprio and someone as homely as Ernest Borgnine would ever play the same character, but the actors indeed share overlapping DNA by both having portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, the controversial Federal Bureau of Investigation director and one of the most powerful figures of the 20th century.

Borgnine is just one of the many actors to have essayed the role in earlier productions, and here’s DiCaprio’s turn at-bat in director Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. Despite being miscast, DiCaprio’s performance is respectable, measured, unfussy … and just a touch dry. It’s always hard to encapsulate an entire life in one running time, but Eastwood and scripter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for penning the excellent Milk) give it a shot — make that scattershot.

Saddled with a worthless framing device in which an elderly Hoover recounts his career for the biographers, the film moves back and forth through different eras to show Hoover’s start at the Bureau of Investigation in 1919 (the “Federal” was added in 1935) right up to his death in 1972. Many of the watermarks surrounding Hoover and his G-Men are included, albeit accorded different measures of importance: The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby is given ample screen time, as is the Bureau’s pursuit of notorious 1930s gangsters. But his evil persecution of civil rights groups and so-called radicals — his real legacy, as far as many people are concerned — never truly takes center stage (Martin Luther King is mentioned, but hardly a whisper is uttered about the Black Panthers), and several career blunders are sidestepped in order to present a fair and balanced portrait. The same problem affects J. Edgar that affected Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady and Oliver Stone’s twofer of Nixon and W.: We aren’t dealing with fair and balanced individuals, and the bending over backwards in an attempt to muster tears — even crocodile tears — is an unfortunate decision.

As for the personal aspects of Hoover’s life, the rumors that he was a closeted homosexual who entered into a lifelong companionship with fellow FBI suit Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) were never substantiated, so Black is forced to make up his own history. The focus, for better or worse, renders this less a comprehensive biopic, more a Brokeback Bureau.