J. Edgar – the man and the movie, both too ambitious

J. Edgar Hoover was a complicated man and Clint Eastwood’s bio-pic doesn’t flinch from or skimp on the man’s complexities. But in trying to show the many, sometimes contradictory, sides of the longtime FBI director, the movie comes off more like a kaleidoscope or crazy quilt than a story. Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Burton might have been truer to Hoover if they had been a little less comprehensive. At the very least, it would have made for a stronger drama.

What complexities are we talking about? Hoover detested law-breakers but in his effort to track them down he often justified breaking the law himself. Similarly, he saw American communists as a grave threat to democratic ideals and yet had no trouble trampling their constitutional rights in a rush to convict them. He was also a stickler for upholding the highest of society’s moral standards and valued the appearance of rectitude to such a degree that he would fire any agent who dared to exhibit facial hair, and yet the never-married Hoover had a life-long male companion with whom he would socialize on a daily basis.

He may have lived in the proverbial “glass house” but that never stopped him from throwing plenty of stones at many of the nation’s most powerful leaders. Perhaps believing the best defense is a strong offense, Hoover was willing to threaten and blackmail just about everyone, including presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy with salacious exposes of their personal lives if he didn’t get what he wanted for his agency (which was usually an increase in his surveillance power.) All the while, Hoover himself was living the most closeted and potentially scandalous personal life of anyone in government.

Eastwood and Burton finesse as best they can this issue of his personal life. In the decades since his death, in the 1970’s, there’s been a lot of speculation about Hoover’s cross-dressing and sexual persuasion but since we don’t know for sure, the movie hedges its bet. It’s made abundantly clear that Hoover has deep feelings for his partner Clyde Toleson but when a sexual move is made, Hoover goes ballistic. Is it because he actually thinks homosexuality is an affront to all things decent and upstanding? Or is he just so repressed he can’t allow himself to follow his deep-seated instincts? The movie is content to keep the answer ambiguous. What IS shown is that, whether platonic or not, the two men’s relationship lasted a lifetime and involved much “domestic” interaction. (As to the cross-dressing issue, the film handles it beautifully, a brief scene that manages to deepen his character without cheapening it.)

This quite personal approach to J.Edgar Hoover provides plenty of material for a single movie to cover but Eastwood and Burton are not content to restrict themselves to just that. They also want to demonstrate his rise to power, how he transformed the FBI from a relatively circumscribed outfit of inefficient lawmen who weren’t even allowed to carry guns into a massive bureaucracy that not only became the number one crimefighting unit in the world but quite possibly the most powerful agency in the entire American government, sometimes eclipsing even the power of the Presidency. The film also explores how Hoover learned to manipulate the media and infiltrate pop culture in such a way as to transform the image of his agency. G-Men to the rescue.

Because the film is insistent on covering so much rich terrain, five decades worth of both social and personal history, the movie unfortunately feels more like a cursory summary than an insightful one.

I credit the film for recognizing the complexity of the man but “J. Edgar” ends up being too ambitious for its own good. Much like its subject.