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On Movies: Eastwood doesn't get his man in 'J. Edgar'

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 14, 2011 - Days after I saw "J. Edgar," Clint Eastwood's exhaustive and exhausting new biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as FBI director John Edgar Hoover, I was still trying to figure out why it didn't work. Then I happened to read an essay in the Nov. 7 New Yorker about a brisk new translation of "The Iliad."

Aristotle, it seems, was a big fan of Homer's epic poem, and one of the things he liked about it was that it didn't try to tell the whole complicated story of the 10-year Trojan war in one long narrative. Told that way, Aristotle judged, the story would be "too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once."

Instead, Homer (whoever that may have been) chose to focus on a single episode from the last year of the war. In narrating, with embellishments and asides, a dramatic series of events springing from the wrath of Achilles over a fairly brief period of time, the poet gave life, form, urgency and human emotion to the war in a context the reader (or listener) could hold in the mind.

Eastwood doesn't do that with J. Edgar Hoover. Instead he tries to give us this very complicated man's whole life -- decade after decade of a half-century career as head of the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency.

There's Red Scare Number One and the Lindbergh kidnapping and the killing of John Dillinger and the spying on Eleanor Roosevelt and Red Scare Number Two and the spying on President John F. Kennedy and Red Scare Number Three and the spying on Martin Luther King and pretty soon the mind reels at the slow passage of time and the lack of focus.

Also, because so much background information is needed to comprehend what is going on, much of the movie is straight exposition -- i.e., talk.

The result is a film that is dramatically inert. Movies are often criticized for being "uneven"; "J. Edgar" is the opposite; it is too even. Nothing really stands out. In one flashback to 1919 early in the movie, the filmmakers try, a bit clumsily, to suggest that Hoover's attitudes toward dissidents were formed as a young man when he witnessed radical violence in his hometown of Washington. Other than that, we spend well more than two hours with J. Edgar Hoover, and he remains a cipher.

To further compound the lack of focus, Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have concocted an ill-advised framing device - Hoover in his final years is dictating the story of his life to a young agent. Hoover's words regularly trigger flashbacks, and the events are presented as if they really happened. There is no way of telling what is historic and what is merely the way Hoover would like his life to be remembered. The story of J. Edgar Hoover is too multi-faceted and juicy and important (and well researched) to be trusted to as unreliable a narrator as J. Edgar Hoover.

You can't fault the actors, including DiCaprio, who manages to overcome pounds of makeup that make him look increasingly like a toad who has eaten way too many flies. Particularly strong performances are turned in by Judi Dench as Hoover's viper of a mother, Naomi Watts as Hoover's mysteriously loyal secretary of many years, and Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson, Hoover's assistant and Longtime Companion. It's clear that Hoover is a deeply repressed homosexual, and the scenes between Hoover and Tolson, who is slightly less repressed, make the relationship vivid without getting all campy about it.

But everything else is murky. Eastwood likes his movies to be dark, visually as well as thematically, and he and his regular cinematographer Tom Stern are true to form with "J. Edgar," where very little that is important happens outside of the shadows. Eastwood may be making a point - much of Hoover's life and work were conducted in the shadows - but after a while the gloom is so pervasive, and the story is told so ploddingly, that the film loses its sense of mystery and becomes merely the dreary story of a dreary man who happened to have way too much power.

Opens Friday Nov. 11

Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon. 

Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes' most recent book is Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement