J Edgar

Clint Eastwood studies the twisted mind of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s first director

As a monster chief bureaucrat of the US for almost half a century, J Edgar Hoover’s extraordinarily successful career says more things about that so-called ‘open’ society than any history book can document. His longevity in office was based entirely on ‘secret’ files that he kept on every American politician and celebrity. He used government machinery to blackmail his opponents into silence, and since several of his victims were US presidents, their reluctance to dismiss him must be read as an absence of courage and conviction, and, more seriously, as indirect approval of the FBI director’s methods. 

Clint Eastwood has taken this abhorrent personality and humanised him in J Edgar, and though this may be necessary for a biopic to work, he could have gone a little easy on the ‘charm’. He could have asked questions about how a man who is so intensely loyal to three people—his mother (Judi Dench), his secretary (Naomi Watts) and his associate and lover at the FBI, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer)—could so nonchalantly, and so completely, destroy the personal and professional lives of hundreds of people he merely felt threatened by.

But Eastwood restricts himself to describing the process of a mind, even a twisted one. His position seems to be that people are what they are, people do what they do, so why get into matters of conscience and motivation? This works as his limitation and his strength. So while J Edgar is a smooth and uncluttered film and does well in covering so many decades, those years are not history but melodrama. We never even glance at the many innocent victims of Hoover’s paranoia.

But Eastwood’s dusting up of history does benefit Leonardo DiCaprio. He is placed centrestage, and though he falters a little (too earnest) as the young J Edgar, he is magnificent as the ageing devil, dissembling his way through government files, tender with his lover and caring with his mother.

Clint EastwoodJ Edgar HooverLeonardo DiCaprio