I must say I was disappointed. I would be interested in your thoughts.
- Edgar (Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Armie Hammer) – Clint Eastwood directed the best bio-pic actor in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio, as a brooding, haunted J. Edgar Hoover. One of the most intriguing personalities of the 20thcentury, Hoover served as head of the FBI (and its predecessors) for eight presidents. No one ever served at such a high level in history, and chance are, Hoover wouldn’t have either has he not had the goods on most of them. That is the implication of the film, which alternates between Hoover’s early days in the ‘30s fighting organized crime and his last days in the Nixon era. A shoo-in for an Oscar nod for Best Make-Up, J. Edgarwill likely also garner an Oscar bid for Leo.
The movie, however, is a bit of a snoozer, at least to me. It is dialogue-heavy, even dialogue boring. I had hoped to find out more about Hoover’s experience with the Presidents he served or, perhaps, more about the Kennedy assassination, the vendetta he seemed to wage against Martin Luther King, or his extensive use of wiretaps. But while these topics were all touched, they were largely sacrificed to a director and writer hell-bent on getting us more into Hoover’s psyche than his work.
We spend an interminable amount of time on his relationships with three people: his deputy and love, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, in a likely Oscs\ar-worthy performance); his mother (Judy Dench), the only woman Hoover ever loved; and his secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts, in an exceptionally unglamorous and layered performance). The Hoover-Tolson relationship is the great irony of Hoover’s life since J. Edgar’s dirty closet was as full as any of the politicians on whom he kept secret files. Eastwood’s Hoover is a true mama’s boy but Dench is merely along for the ride here. Hoover and Gandy started as a date but she was disinterested and he was, well, not oriented that way. So she became his most loyal servant, the original Rose Mary Woods who allegedly shred the files rather than erased the tape.
The Eastwood soundtrack is typically piano-heavy and plodding, which also tends to lull you to sleep. The pace is slow, too. But this is a biography, not a drama. Next year, we get Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln and that will not be boring, I predict. DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes had the advantage of Scorsese’s sense of period and ambiance. Eastwood has little of either and his film suffers as a result, even if the performances shine.