J. Edgar Reviews

Even though it wasn't well received when it was released, since Clint Eastwood is one of the best directors at work nowadays, I still wanted to check it out. I mean, the whole thing sounded great on paper: one of the best directors and one of the best actors working together on a biopic on one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the whole thing was indeed rather disappointing. Basically, they kind of messed up the script in my opinion. I mean, if we follow the story line, Hoover not only created the FBI, but was also a repressed homosexual, allegedly a cross dresser, a socially impaired borderline autistic fellow and his mother was apparently a b*tch as well. That was frankly a little too much too swallow as a viewer and a little too difficult to handle for the makers. In my opinion, they should have dropped a few elements and correctly handle what they kept. Take his secretary for example. They first have this peculiar date but it doesn't go anywhere and they decide she should be his secretary, that's about it. Indeed, for the rest of the movie, you have a great actress of Naomi Watts caliber showing up from time to time, doing a secretary. A part from that, she didn't have anything else to do during the whole damned thing so she could have been dropped all together as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it wasn't a bad movie, far from it, as a matter of fact, the great late Roger Ebert loved it. The whole thing looked really good, Leonardo DiCaprio did a pretty good job as well and there was something really interesting about this character but they didn't approach the material from the right angle. Still, like I said before, even if it was rather disappointing, it is far from being a bad flick and I still think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Clint Eastwood's work.

J Edgar the movie directed by powerful Clint Eastwod and acted by Leonardo DiCaprio. This is the story about J Edgar Hoover, Director General of FBI, who served for 48 years in beureau for eight US presidents. Infact Edgar was the founder of FBI.

The movie is quite good, I wander why it didn't make it way to Oscar Nominations going to be dished out tonite.

J Edgar Hoover's character is set in stone from the time he began working for the government as a young man. He is wholly dedicated to his job, which to him is protecting the American people and the security of the nation from all threats, both foreign and domestic.

J Edgar the movie directed by powerful Clint Eastwod and acted by Leonardo DiCaprio. This is the story about J Edgar Hoover, Director General of FBI, who served for 48 years in beureau for eight US presidents. Infact Edgar was the founder of FBI.

The movie is quite good, I wander why it didn't make it way to Oscar Nominations going to be dished out tonite.

J Edgar Hoover's character is set in stone from the time he began working for the government as a young man. He is wholly dedicated to his job, which to him is protecting the American people and the security of the nation from all threats, both foreign and domestic.

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.
To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.

Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.

Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.

Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.

That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).

The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

NYT

With perhaps the most successful actor turned director behind the camera and featuring one of the most popular actors in this current era, there seemed like there was nothing that was going to stop this becoming a huge success! Despite that there are various references that the film consists of that is beyond anything than Eastwood or DiCaprio have been part of, expectations were still high. Plus, with the bad luck that they’ve mutually shared in most recent years, they both needed to be at the best of their game to become strong Oscar contenders. So, having said this, unfortunately J. Edgar became a rather big disappointment that could have been so much better but it still had its one or two qualities.


The most crucial features within J. Edgar where it suffers the most is that it really did not serve a thought-provoking meaning or message that enables the audience to stick with and to really think about. In most of the scenes, it just fell flat and there wasn’t all that much chemistry between the characters, especially between Hoover and Tolson. It really could have been as solid emotionally and politically as Milk by Gus Van Sant back in 2008 but the majority of the time, the film wasn’t really getting anywhere and became something that was rather lost at what it was trying to tell to its audience. Technically, the film looked good especially with the impressive make-up used for the characters in the most recent time settings and should have gained an Academy Award nomination in that category.


Considering that Leonardo DiCaprio generally looks exactly the same appearance-wise throughout most of the films that he has been involved in and has delivered some fantastic performances over the years, DiCaprio was still decent enough to endure on the screen but this is definitely not one of the best of his career. He lacked that inspirational and emotionally confused tone to J. Edgar’s character that made him a very crucial part in American history with his personal life as a closeted homosexual. Plus, the number of DiCaprio’s different pronunciations varied and became an almost complete jumble of American accents, so that became a severe blow to the character too. To be honest, DiCaprio could have pulled it off exquisitely like Sean Penn did in his Oscar-winning performance as Harvey Milk and given him a long-overdue Academy Award but quite frankly, DiCaprio’s Edgar just felt empty, shallow and completely soulless from start to finish.


Although it was never officially confirmed but having had its certain suspicions, the possible homosexual relationship between Hoover and his protégé Clyde Tolson perhaps was not focused or deeply analysed often enough. In fact, without reading about Hoover and Tolson themselves and by watching the film, you wouldn’t be able to identify that there was the possible forbidden love between them (apart from the one unexpected kiss). After his performance as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network by David Fincher, Armie Hammer’s performance was, like DiCaprio, satisfactory but wasn’t realistic enough to feel emotionally attached to. It may be a rather difficult task for two male actors or two female actresses who are real-life heterosexuals to form a strong homosexual relationship on-screen, but both Tolson and DiCaprio acted like they didn’t want to be part of this film. Naomi Watts may be an underrated actress as it is and may have been under-used again in J. Edgar but in all honesty, her character was virtually completely pointless and served almost no key part in the film at all. Judi Dench makes an appearance too as Hoover’s mother and provided a typical tender mother nature but also her occasional dark side too, especially regarding homosexuality.


Most recently being the director of a biographical drama about Nelson Mandella and the Rugby World Cup and then a supernatural-fantasy drama, veteran actor and director Clint Eastwood unfortunately never received any top-spot awards for his work. Shamefully, J. Edgar really isn’t the best that Clint or any of the actors within the film can do, so it is quite possibly Clint’s worst film as director to date. He really missed the point with this one and achieved neither the ruthless and power-hungry governmental figure of the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover nor about Hoover himself personally as a lonesome and depressed homosexual. He also perhaps sinks as low to how Oliver Stone has turned out now after how great he was before! Having already written the script for Milk, Dustin Lance Black pens J. Edgar in his second film linked with homosexuality and politics and like Clint and the rest of the cast, it is another aspect where it could have been so much better!


Overall, J. Edgar is perhaps the most disappointing film that you’ll see in 2011 with shockingly flat and rather rushed direction from Clint Eastwood, an over-long and rather dry script from Dustin Lance Black but still with the occasionally good performances from the cast. If you’re a fan of both Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio, you’ll most likely be disappointed with this as it is almost completely turned into something than it should have been. So, pretty much everyone involved in this film will really need to make up for this one in the future.

"What's important at this time is to re-clarify the difference between hero and villain."

The word "okay" is the most apt adjective for 2011's J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood's unambitious but handsomely-mounted biopic of one of the most interesting men of the 20th Century. The direction is okay and the acting is merely okay... Apart from lavish sets and (mostly) stunning makeup, nothing stands out as memorable or above-average in this blatant piece of Oscar bait. It's a shame, too, as the production was blessed with a lot of talent: Clint Eastwood at the helm, Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, Brian Grazer & Ron Howard producing, and even Dustin Lance Black (Milk) behind the script. The mention of such names only serves to heighten the disappointment that the flick represents. This is Eastwood's laziest effort in years. Perhaps the former acting heavyweight is just getting too old to be patient with his craft.

From an early age, John Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) showed determination to defend America from the Communist and criminal scum posing a threat to his beloved nation. Becoming a law enforcer in his 20s, Hoover worked his way through the ranks to become the Director of the FBI, where he introduced revolutionary methods such as forensics and fingerprinting. Hoover was also notorious for embellishing stories to the public, claiming to have personally taken down outlaws like John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis. Meanwhile, Hoover's personal life was a mess. Behind closed doors he was a closet homosexual: he maintained a long-term relationship with his second-in-command Clyde Tolson (Hammer), but was afraid that his sexual orientation may harm his image and legacy.

The retelling of Hoover's life is framed around the man dictating his life story and professional triumphs to various assistants to form the basis for an upcoming book. It's a clever storytelling method in theory, as it allows the script to explore Hoover's insatiable quest to eternally preserve himself as a great man in the eyes of the public. The device almost works...almost. While it permits a window into Hoover's psyche, it denies the chance to genuinely get into the more controversial and unsavoury aspects of his character. And when the chance finally arises for such aspects to be exposed, Black squanders the opportunity. See, at one point Clyde confronts Hoover about events he either sensationalised or outright made up in his memoirs. But this idea is dropped after a short single scene, denying Clyde the chance to provide further insights.

The key problems with J. Edgar stem from both Dustin Lance Black's script and Clint Eastwood's handling of it. Rather than examining Hoover's extensive commitment to the FBI, the flick simply runs through several key events without any sort of consistent through line. Black's flawed script lacks ambition, too. The writer was keen to open up several cans of worms - including Hoover's homosexuality and rumoured cross-dressing - but he can only watch them wriggle around. A lot of time is dedicated to showing Hoover and Tolson spending time together, yet the relationship is too tasteful and gutless. It's a shallow depiction of their romantic involvement, harmlessly observing them but never going under the surface to explore their love. Instead, it boils down to a lot of clandestine glances and dialogue of scattershot quality. Granted, Black's point was most likely that Hoover was just tragically stubborn and was unable to embrace his full self since he was living in an era of narrow-mindedness, but something more daring would have made for more enthralling cinema. This is too dry. History books also reveal countless fascinating things about Hoover (especially in his later life), barely any of which were incorporated into the finished movie. Things are played too safe, and the film lacks the guts to be ambitious. What a wasted opportunity.

Added to this, the script's nonlinear approach is ineffective; it haphazardly leaps around the timeline for no particular reason when a more straightforward retelling would have worked far better. Clint's direction exacerbates this issue; a handful of scene transitions are poor, and there's a distinct lack of focus and discipline. The editing, too, feels lazy. Admittedly, however, J. Edgar gets better as it moves along, with the amateurish opening segment giving way to a number of enthralling scenes throughout the midsection. Most successful are the scenes dealing with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, which are so engaging that the subplot should have been given its own movie. The makeup deserves a mention, too. DiCaprio and Watts look especially convincing as the older versions of their characters, though the makeup job on Armie Hammer looks positively ghastly.

For all of the cynical critics dismissively saying that Leonardo DiCaprio is in pure Oscar baiting mode here, the actor is surprisingly mixed. His accent at no point feels convincingly lived-in; it feels like Clint used his trademark one-take method all the time, never permitting Leo the chance to feel comfortable in Hoover's skin. His voice doesn't entirely convince; it seems to be a random mix of his real voice and a forced accent, which is bewildering since he's one of the finest actors of this generation. Additionally, Leo's voice remains the same as Hoover ages, which betrays the convincing makeup effects. Billy Crudup was far more authentic and memorable as J. Edgar Hoover in 2009's Public Enemies (a superior flick). The rest of the acting, though, is more successful. Armie Hammer excellently embodies the role of Clyde Tolson, and he's completely believable as he runs through various challenging emotions. Meanwhile, despite a thankless role, Naomi Watts impresses as Hoover's loyal secretary, and Judi Dench is her usual exceptional self as Hoover's mother. Also worth mentioning is Josh Lucas, who's very good as Charles Lindbergh.

Viewers seeking profound insight into the life and personality of J. Edgar Hoover will have to look elsewhere - Eastwood's movie is a strictly superficial affair which only teases, resulting in an incomplete filmic sketch of this fascinating man. Interesting to note, J. Edgar was originally slated for a mid-late 2012 release, but was pulled forward a year...after filming had wrapped. Another year of post-production could have facilitated reshoots, stronger editing, and generally more care. What we're left with feels like an early rough cut that only occasionally shows promise of what it could have been. J. Edgar is not bad per se - it's just an underwhelming, limp career overview of someone who deserves a far more substantial biopic. Just think of what someone like Oliver Stone could've made of this project...

5.7/10