J. Edgar

  J. Edgar

Imagine Entertainment, 2011

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench

Two and a half stars 

Ever since Clint Eastwood delivered his last (and by many accounts, greatest) Western with the near-perfect 1993 Best Picture/Director winner Unforgiven, his films have explored a vast variety of subjects and characters, both historical and fictional, featured many of the most respected actors in the business (and earned a good number of them Oscar nominations), and have made him one of the most prolific directors currently working. I must confess that my experience with the Eastwood oeuvre is rather lacking, but of what I've seen, his films range from favorites (Unforgiven) to other Best Picture/Director winners (Million Dollar Baby) to films that would just miss my favorites list, but that I still respect in every way (Mystic River), to flawed but compelling character pieces (last year's Hereafter), to enjoyable star vehicles for the man himself (his farewell to acting in 2008's Gran Torino), all the way to Invictus, a film that I thought to be directionless and unnecessary, and one that really only justified it's existence because it gave Morgan Freeman a chance to play Nelson Mandela, a performance that comes nowhere close to his best. J. Edgar, much like the majority of Eastwood's recent output, is a compelling, well-made and exquisitely acted piece of cinema, and just like most of his recent films, it suffers from flaws that make it hard to enjoy completely.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that Leonardo DiCaprio owns the title role and gives one of his best performances to date here. It's a showy piece of acting, as DiCaprio's portrayal spans many years and tackles a complex character full of contradictions, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Academy chooses to recognize him come nomination time, even if they ignore the film apart from his performance. There's not a moment of this film where DiCaprio isn't fully committed to the character, and that's what gives the film it's pulse and elevates it above what it would be with a lesser actor in the role. I've generally liked DiCaprio in his more likable roles, like in last years Inception, or his role opposite Tom Hanks in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, an all time favorite of mine, but here, he brings complexity to a character that could easily have become a villainous performance. That the audience never quite knows whether they like or hate Edgar is one of the film's greatest triumphs, though some of the credit must be given to Eastwood, who's built his career on exploring the antihero.

If DiCaprio is the film's greatest strength, then it's the script, penned by Academy Award Winner Dustin Lance Black (who won for Milk), that is it's greatest weakness. The film opens with a fantastic hook: the bombing of the house of Hoover's predecessor at the FBI (though it's not called that yet, to give an idea for the vast amount of time this screenplay spans), a piece of communist activity that, as the movie tells us, pushes Hoover towards everything he will fight for throughout his life. The film draws the audience in right from the get go, and then relies on DiCaprio to carry it for the remainder of it's running time, something that works for a little while, but falls apart as the film reaches it's second and third acts. Black saddles the movie with the rather uninspired format of Hoover telling his life story to someone else, which results in seemingly random jumps through time that make the screenplay feel jarring, sloppy, and, worst of all, unfocused. We do get a sense of who this man is, but the characters around him and the relationships he has with them feel so thoroughly one-dimensional that it's hard to understand what Black was going for. Is this a history? Is it a character study? Is it a political film? It has shades of all of those, but it never becomes one of them fully. And DiCaprio's stellar supporting cast, featuring the great Judi Dench as his mother, Naomi Watts as his secretary and The Social Network's Armie Hammer as a longtime colleague, could have been the basis for a dynamite ensemble cast, but the film is so singularly focused on J. Edgar that his supporters end up feeling like they're simply there to fulfill a very specific function.

I don't really understand how this could have happened with the script, since Black's work on Milk was almost the opposite. He got to the emotional core of that story; he found out what made the characters tick, and it was his exceptional work that drove the film and allowed Sean Penn to do what he needed to do to earn his second Oscar (the first, naturally, earned for an Eastwood film). But Penn wasn't the only one who shone brightly in that film, and it wasn't because it had a stronger slate of actors than this one, but because Black fully understood the supporting characters as well. He understood the relationship between Penn and James Franco's characters, he understood Dan White (played in a career best performance by James Brolin), and he understood that his pleasant outward facade hid a troubled, unpredictable man underneath, and that was why the moment when he pulled the trigger and we saw Harvey Milk fall was still so shocking, even though we already knew it was coming. The final minutes of that film are some of the most emotionally moving I've ever seen, and that's mostly thanks to the way Black built the story, how he established the characters and their relationships, and how he tied it up at the end: it was, in my opinion, the way a biopic should be made. He tries to frame the story here similarly, but he's missing the key aspects: the emotional connection, the supporting character depth and the relationships therein. It makes sense, I guess: Milk was a passion project for Black, who was inspired by Harvey Milk when he was struggling with his own sexuality. He tries to find homosexual themes in this film as well, and it almost works: the relationship between Edgar and Clyde Tolson (Hammer) was rumored to be a gay relationship, and Black goes beyond mere hints here, which isn't necessarily a problem as the relationship between DiCaprio and Hammer is the only one that I really bought into (unlike the mother-son connection between Dench and DiCaprio), but then we find ourselves again with the problem that the film is just trying to do too many things, and not doing any of them in great enough detail.

Despite all of this, I did enjoy J. Edgar. There's a better film here than the one that finds it's way out, but it's beautifully shot, with some impressive (and some questionable) aging make-up, and every actor here does their best with the material given to them. DiCaprio obviously shines the brightest, and that's how it should be, but Hammer shouldn't be overlooked, since he's clearly announced himself as an actor to watch with strong supporting roles these past two years. Ultimately, it's another good, if significantly flawed film from Eastwood, and even though I wouldn't call it among the year's best, I would still recommend it on the strength of DiCaprio's performance alone. He's never been one of my favorite actors, though I love some of his films (Catch Me if You Can, The Departed, Inception) and admire his work in others that I didn't quite love (The Aviator, Shutter Island). I'm almost certain that he'll find his way to an Oscar one day, and if this is the film to do it, I wouldn't be sorry at all. Something tells me he's not due quite yet, but stranger things have happened, and on that possibility alone, the film is a must-see for those who care about such things.