EW Movie Review: "J. Edgar"
By: Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the relentless J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s new film. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly magazine filed the following review.
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As an actor, Leonardo DiCaprio has often seemed trapped in his lean and eager boyishness. So I was skeptical of how well he would do in the role of that stocky, ruthless bulldog J. Edgar Hoover, the most famous director — in many ways the inventor — of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But in Clint Eastwood’s emotionally detached yet absorbing “J. Edgar,” DiCaprio does more than disappear behind prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.
Even when he’s young, DiCaprio’s Hoover is starchy and furrowed, with eyebrows scrunched down low. He looks a bit like the Dick Tracy villain Flattop. DiCaprio gives him a gleam of suspicion, a jarringly proper Brahmin accent, and a stately, formal body language that will harden, over time, into a combative waddle.
The movie cuts back and forth between the ’20s and ’30s, when Hoover built the FBI and planted it in the popular imagination, and the early ’60s, when his methods began to congeal into something paranoid and deluded. The crosscutting, frankly, is a bit much, and the film never quite finds a present tense. Yet Dustin Lance Black’s script is densely detailed and fascinating. The movie is a dramatic essay about how Hoover fused the law and repression, heroism and corruption.
The closest the film comes to having an emotional center is Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson, played with soft sympathy by “The Social Network”’s Armie Hammer. Tolson becomes Hoover’s right-hand man and constant dinner companion. As the film presents it, the two experience a love that can’t be acted on, that can’t even speak its name. That’s Hoover’s tragedy, but it's also his pathology. His obsession with secrecy, with using illegal wiretaps to keep private files on politicians like JFK for the implicit threat of blackmailing them, emerges out of his hidden sense of shame. That said, his angry paranoia isn’t exactly something you can identify with.
I was held by J. Edgar, but it’s a movie, like the man at its center, with a buried heart.