This review was originally published in UAB's Kaleidoscope on November 12th, 2011.
Biopics have been popular since the very beginning of cinema, and tend to follow two main courses: a simple chronological approach and those that use framing devices to bookend things, such as an interview or some particular milestone in the person’s career.
Leave it to a guy that’s in what most would consider an artist’s twilight years to completely try and reinvent the wheel altogether. Of course, Clint Eastwood is no mere guy: he’s a living legend. So there’s that.
J. Edgar is an odd bird of a movie, to be sure. Every now and again I see a film that’s so bonkers in some way that I feel compelled to want to see it again just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.
Typically, that’s a good thing, but sometimes it’s just because I can hardly believe what I saw. Think Natural Born Killers or Fight Club. However, J. Edgar is bonkers in a completely different way.
The structure is similar to, of all things, TV’s Lost, or at least what that structure was revealed to be over time. For those unfamiliar- mild spoiler alerts- the show bounced back and forth in time from the past to the perceived present to what can best be described as "alternate realities." J. Edgar is just like that- including the alternate realities part.
It starts out rationally enough, with the requisite, aforementioned framing device- in this case, J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) dictating his memoirs to a series of secretaries over the years.
The film then proceeds to bounce willy-nilly through Hoover’s life story in a seemingly random, free-form manner. Certain events, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, are told over the course of the movie’s various flashbacks in a chronological fashion. Others just pop up randomly, like the filmic equivalent to a music mash-up. Hoover’s greatest hits, if you will.
The film also announces at a certain point that some of the events we are being shown, as dictated by Hoover, are also sometimes exaggerated or outright fictionalized by Hoover himself. So, in other words, a lot of what we are being shown is complete fabrication.
What’s more, Eastwood himself does his fair share of speculation, dramatizing some scenes that are, at best, total fiction; and at times verge on full-blown camp, or at least high melodrama. It’s like some demented combination of John Huston and Douglas Sirk.
I damn-near laughed out loud in several completely inappropriate moments, like the one in which a male character lovingly sniffed Hoover’s handkerchief. (I’m not kidding.)
And you better believe Eastwood has Hoover in drag at one point. How could he not, in this movie? Might as well go for broke, right? It may well be the most off-the-charts crazy Oscar bait-type movie I’ve ever seen.
It’s not just the whole notion of Hoover being a latent/repressed homosexual in a time that frowned upon such things. That subject matter could absolutely be handled in a sensitive, moving, non-camp way, and indeed has been- in Far from Heaven, to name just one. This is not that movie.
Between the dubious and distracting old age make-up sported by most of the main cast at some point- including Armie Hammer (The Social Network) as Hoover’s longtime “companion” and Naomi Watts as Hoover’s ever-loyal, asexual secretary- and the meta-narrative structure, this is one bent movie.
All of the above actors give fine performances underneath it all- though Hammer seems the most out-of-his-depth overall- but to what end? I can’t imagine this one sweeping the Oscars under the best of circumstances.
It’s not a terrible movie, just a weird one, and we all know how weird movies fare at Oscar time (i.e. Pulp Fiction, which lost to the much-more staid Forest Gump).
I think the best review I could possibly give to this movie is to say that if any of this sounds the least bit intriguing to you, it probably will be. If it sounds like a huge mess, then you will probably find it to be just that. Who says movies can’t be different things to different people, no matter what their tastes?
J. Edgar is too scattershot to be a modern-day classic, or even a classic of the biopic format. It’s lavishly produced, beautifully shot, and never boring, really. Yet the whole thing just seems a little bit off somehow.
I’m not sure what Eastwood was going for, but you’ve got to hand it to the guy for keeping things so interesting, even this late into his career. Maybe for his next film, he’ll do a stylistic mash-up of Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch. Now that would be something!
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