J. Edgar: Lights, Camera, but not much Action

J. Edgar is not a bad film, but it’s also not a good film. It’s disconcerting to sit and watch a film, rather than become involved in it, but that is the J. Edgar experience for me this afternoon. I anticipated a better, more engaging movie when I saw the previews, as well as the list of actors, but the totality of the characters, the acting, and the script does not live up to my expectations.

Leonardo DeCaprio is an outstanding actor and he does a credible job in the role of J. Edgar Hoover, but the script doesn’t support his acting ability. In scenes with his film mother (Judith Dench), I had flashbacks to Psycho as the relationship is creepy in a really creepy way. When it appears she is dead (hard to tell life from death due to the make-up) and her son puts on her beads and her dress, I expected him to turn away from the mirror and be in the scene in the basement with dear old mummy in the rocking chair!

And, although I’m sure the director, Clint Eastwood, intends the sexuality to be inferred through the viewer’s point of view, the film ends up as a vehicle for “outing” J. Edgar Hoover without anyone coming out and saying “he’s so gay.” Dear old Mom hints at her own disdain for Daffodils, but it doesn’t seem as if Edgar takes her words to heart. The viewer is left to believe that Edgar and his assistant, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), enjoy a platonic love affair for darned near 50 years, and that strains both gay and straight credulity.

The shift from past to present is distracting, along with using writing a memoir as a tool to make the shifts. I like a story told chronologically so I can develop the "this is what happened, this is why it happened, and this is what resulted from the happening" understanding of the sequence of events. The emphasis on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping is made to become the turning point for the FBI, but it falls flat and feels unemotional and unimportant. The loyalty of his life-long secretary (Helen Gandy) and the secret secret Hoover files purportedly used to blackmail people in high places ends at a shredder; fade to black screen. Not only do I not believe that all those files were shredded, but I also don’t believe that a young, good-looking woman, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), would work for almost 50 years for a man who, first, asks her to marry him on date 3 and then turns his back on her to be with his more than loyal male “assistant,” Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), who comes across as so totally gay that even those of us who don't have any sense of gaydar know that he's gay!

I was excited when I recognized the actor who plays Michael Weston (Burn Notice), but thought he was playing one of his TV role characters, rather than Robert Kennedy, when he used a phony Boston accent and brushed his hair to the side. He's much more believable on Burn Notice than he is as Robert Kennedy.

See? Even trying to hit the high points reveals that there aren’t many and they aren’t very high. Best scene in the movie? Toss-up between Edgar’s reaction to his mother’s death and/or Tolson's reactions to Edgar’s death – and someone has to die to make the scenes work. Yeah.