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Leonardo DiCaprio portrays J. Edgar Hoover in the new film from director  Clint Eastwood.

J. Edgar Hoover’s Life Seems Tailor-Made For Eastwood Film

By Maggie Scott

It’s hard now for even elder baby boomers to remember how much of a bogey-man J. Edgar Hoover was; how pervasively his anarchist-, criminal-, and moral degenerates- hunting tactics infiltrated much of early-to-nearly late 20th century society’s consciousness.  Hoover’s formidable and outrageous career and enigmatic personality are tailor-made for a visual treatment such as cartoonist Rick Geary wrote and illustrated (J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography, 2008); not so much for the lush cinematic biopic adaptation J.Edgar, as conceived by director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.  After all, Hoover’s early crime-busting exploits were the subject of Hoover-sanctioned comic books.  Today, it’s hard to conceive of the singularly chilling effect Hoover’s ultimate powers of surveillance had then on lives innocent—and guilty—of crimes and sedition, when the power to tap and hack into people’s lives now grows ever more an all-encompassing.  Hoover’s life certainly warrants a thoughtful, thorough examinatio—not least because of the vision he had of a highly skilled crime-fighting force with national scope, aided by cutting-edge investigative resources.

Fans of TV’s “CSI, “Law and Order” and other crime-fighting shows be warned that Eastwood and Black are essentially giving us a Power Point presentation on the mind and life of Hoover. This film is  not an instruction manual on how he turned a small federal investigation bureau in Washington, D.C., into the vast and powerful Federal Bureau of Investigation; an entity at its height under Hoover’s reign seemingly beyond the control of courts, legislatures and even Presidents.

Structured clumsily around an elder Hoover (he died in 1972) dictating “for this generation his side of the story,” the film is a straightforward-enough laundry list of watershed events that made Hoover and the FBI the right person and the right organization for the times, even as he and it used ever more dubious and shameful tactics.  But, again, Eastwood and Black aren’t interested much in those events beyond how they shaped Hoover  portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.  There’s not much difference between Hoover the man and Hoover the crime-fighter.  Hoover’s life was crime; an eagerly pursued cause that only incidentally would “restore the Hoover family to greatness,” as the youth was charged by his overbearing mother, Annie (Judi Dench).

From “Bolshevik” bombers, dedicated to “ridding the world of the U.S.’s tyrannical institutions” in 1919 and the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, to tommy gun-toting gangsters, soul-corrupting Communists and morally compromised public figures—Hoover zealously pursues for over 50 years what he considers the disloyal, the agitators, the subversives and the hoodlums.

Occasionally, Hoover’s philosophy and methods are questioned: “ideas, not crimes” are being investigated; wiretapping goes too far.  But, Hoover brooks no opposition.  Agents must meet rigid standards of dress, conduct and physical conditioning.  Hoover’s executive assistant, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), is loyalty personified; a woman the youthful Hoover once considered for marriage, but who, like her boss, put work ahead of a personal life.  And then, there’s Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the supposed love-of-Hoover’s-life.

Second-in-command; Hoover’s “alter-ego;” by Hoover’s side whether taking down gangsters, testifying before Congress for money to support an ever-growing agency, eating at the Stork Club, or watching the thoroughbreds head for the wire at California’s Del Mar racetrack, Tolson shares every crucial moment of Hoover’s public and private life.  Advancing age, the creation of the CIA, and a change in the public’s perception of the threat of Communism (“foreign, not domestic”) are the only challenges to Hoover’s dominance up to the moment. Hoover realizes that he has recognized in Richard Nixon his own will to “do anything to hold on to power.”  Peppered with hazy figures little-known or remembered, receding in the mists of another time of innocence corrupted in the name of protecting the American people, Eastwood’s work maintains an oddly respectful distance from Hoover’s excesses; eschewing both sensationalism and gritty realism. This is not an overt stand against tyrannical abusers of authority who thumb their noses at civil rights.  Hoover’s deeds presented here speak for themselves as a cautionary tale.   DiCaprio’s sensational performance is given excellent supporting work by all.  An Imagine Entertainment production, rated R for language.

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