Following J. Edgar Hoover`s (Leonardo Dicaprio) career from the early 20th century to his demise in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood`s latest film tries too hard for sobriety in documenting the arguably sensationalistic life and patchwork legacy of the man himself, from his ambitious rise to power-beginning with the 1919 bombings of Woodrow Wilson`s attorney general Palmer- to his hounding of Martin Luther King Jr during the Civil Rights era.
Hoover himself as a character in the film is neither sympathetic nor an antihero, displaying a sordid sort of paranoid megalomania that is superficially fascinating but gives little other insight into his character. The inner workings of the man himself is relegated to an almost pathological fear of his mother Annie, played with panache by Dame Judi Dench, and anxieties over his repressed homosexual issues with second-in-command Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). To give the devil his due, Dicaprio puts in an impressively heavyweight performance, almost managing to buoy the flawed material he has to work with; taking all that into consideration the poor guy should have been at least nominated for an Oscar for this one. For shame, Oscar Committee!
For those of us more geographically and temporally removed from that bygone era of American federal law enforcement, J. Edgar is a film that manages to be both epic and empty, both fixated with sexuality and curiously bloodless, both – well, you get the idea. Like its subject matter, the film is just confused. Where those fossils at?
Summary: Clint `Dirty Harry` Eastwood`s first directorial misfire.
Ratings: 2.5/5 Raphael Lim