Currer reviews J. Edgar, a film with Oscar aspirations, but without the qualities to match
Natalie Golding is The Currer Ball
Apparently, J. Edgar isn’t just a textbook exercise in how to appeal to awards’ bodies. Turns out, it’s also a film. Fooled me. It’s just that all the woo Oscar warning signs are there. Prestigious director? Check. Big performance by Hollywood megastar? Check. Controversial historical figure? Check. More checks than JEH’s secret plaid skirt (all will become clear).
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: the film belongs to Leonardo DiCaprio, who turns in a performance that’s half charming, half chilling. One moment, his Hoover’s flirting with pretty young things, the next he’s manipulating the machinery of government, motivated by little more than the sort of deep rooted paranoia normally associated with tin foil hat wearing fruit loops.
Certainly, for someone like me, i.e. a non-American with only a nominal familiarity of the life and times of Hoover, J. Edgar works well as a docu-drama. The relationship with his mother (Judi Dench as the icy American matriarch, who matches Mrs Bates for bossiness), is particularly fascinating, if a little underdeveloped. And the film does a brilliant job of depicting Hoover’s immense influence on the US justice system, contrasting his quest for a more scientific, evidence-based approach with a megalomaniacal vanity that drove him to fire agents without much evidence. There’s even a surprisingly touching nod to the rumours that Hoover was a cross-dresser – hence the plaid skirt gag.
But for every stroke of finesse, there’s a flaw. Case study: the ageing of the film’s youthful cast. DiCaprio fares better, his natural boynishness fading into jowly senescence as the film flashes back and forth. Unfortunately, the no doubt first-class crew appear to be powerless in the face of Armie Hammer’s Ken doll good looks. No amount of latex or liver spots can stop him from resembling a modern-day matinee idol sporting fake wrinkles. The makeup will still probably get nominated for an Oscar tomorrow, but judging by last week’s Golden Globes, I suspect this has more to do with people in LA-La Land having no idea what old people actually look like. (I’ve a sneaking suspicion that at the first sight of a wrinkle, old folk are taken out back, stamped on ‘til compost, and recycled into wheatgrass smoothies). Even without the makeup, Hammer’s ridiculous attractiveness often distracts from what’s actually a fine performance as Hoover’s lifelong deputy Clyde Tolson, not helped by a script that doesn’t really bother to develop his character.
Like The Iron Lady, J. Edgar cracks under the weight of its ambitions, trying to cram more than 50 of the most interesting and turbulent years in American history from the perspective of one of its most controversial figures into just over 2 hours. Like the Thatcher biopic, it also glosses over key chapters in Hoover’s life story. In the film, Hoover’s single-minded pursuit of Martin Luther King is intense, but never explained – a couple of clicks on Google are all that it takes to read about Hoover’s alleged dislike of black people. By the same token, McCarthyism, Kennedy’s assassination, and other cultural touchstones barely merit a mention. It’s clear from the film’s IMDb entry, which credits a great deal more people than those who actually made the final cut, that vast swathes of the movie vanished during the editing process, leading me to wonder how much better this might’ve been spread over 2 films.
It would’ve been bad form (not to mention bad movie-making) to create a completely one-sided account of Hoover’s life. But so little is known about the protagonist that a little more speculation might’ve leavened the whole endeavour. Little wonder then that the most interesting moments are the (fictional) scenes between Hoover and Tolson, informed largely by Clint Eastwood’s imagination. Sadly, this marks the extent of the artistic licence taken – no one, apart from Hoover, has more than one dimension to them, and there’s more questions raised (about Hoover’s father, brother, and relationships with women) than are satisfactorily answered.
J. Edgar isn’t a bad movie – it’s got too much pedigree for that – but I did come away with a nagging sense that without its top drawer cast and director, it’s not much more than a very glossy, very ambitious movie-of-the-week (an assessment supplemented by the hordes of American TV actors – poached from everything from Friends to Burn Notice – that crop up in every other scene). It seems unlikely that this Oscar bait is fit to catch anything more than a few minnows.
