Monday, November 14, 2011

J. EDGAR (Eastwood, 2011)



No one can be faulted for thinking Clint Eastwood was going to play it safe. Eastwood, one of the last surviving icons of old Hollywood, has spent the past decade churning out increasingly monochromatic dramas, draining the vitality out of his stars (his amusingly cantankerous turn in Gran Torino excepted) and bleaching the complexity out of his themes. His last two films, Hereafter and Invictus, seemed to mark the end of his willingness to challenge his audience or even engage to with his subject matter on any compelling level. The first trailer for J. Edgar only confirmed the diagnosis: here were all the Eastwood trademarks - the same grayscale color filter, the same ploddingly obvious score - with the added bonus of the same high-profile biopic beats we’ve seen in countless other Oscar-hungry true-life dramas, applied to one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic figures.
                
But Eastwood’s J. Edgar is not the film that’s been advertised, and that’s made abundantly clear from the first moment we see the man himself, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in heavy age makeup that lends him an uncanny resemblance to a wax figure of Jon Voight that’s been left out in the sun. The first time we see DiCaprio’s Hoover is a crucial moment in the film, perhaps the most crucial – are we, as an audience, going to accept this instantly recognizable actor caked in questionable choices as a major player in our country’s relatively recent history? Many critics, from the well-respected to the most notorious quote whores, have emphatically answered no, dismissing the film with vaguely condescending reviews that all uniformly point to the bad makeup as a reason why the film need not be taken seriously. I must respectfully disagree.
                
For me, that first shot of DiCaprio in what amounts to old-man drag firmly removes J. Edgar from the senior-class-photo of well-intentioned, cleanly conventional biopics and shoves it under the bleachers to hang with the bad kids. This movie bums cigarettes off of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, a willfully diffuse shattered-glass portrait of Bob Dylan that left both neophytes and devotees confused or even angry. The makeup (on not only DiCaprio, but also Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts) functions as a theatrical device of the kind employed by Bertolt Brecht, the hugely influential playwright and director who invented the concept of the verfremdungseffekt (from the German meaning “to make strange”) to prevent his audience from responding to his allegorical dramas of social unrest with merely emotional catharsis. He wanted his audience to consider the implications and the causes of what they were witnessing, to be free to draw parallels with the political and social climate of the day, and ultimately, to incite social change and political upheaval. We cannot attribute these motivations to J. Edgar – it lacks the clarity of purpose necessary for that. What Eastwood’s Brechtian devices do invite us to do, however, is consider the film as the product of a man’s grappling with his legacy, and his place within the country that turned him into a cultural icon.
                
Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay – pointedly not based on any pre-existing material – reconstitutes some of the major episodes of the first half of the twentieth century as a bizarre, time-shifting pageant of history, replete with a seemingly never-ending parade of readily recognizable actors portraying iconic figures they barely resemble, if at all (“Hey, there’s Josh Lucas!”, etc.) and an odd framing device of Hoover dictating his memoirs to a succession of blandly handsome young actors, whose names and faces are so vague as to suggest they are manifestations of Hoover’s obsession with young male bodies more than actual characters. All this turns what could have been a textbook-dry stroll down memory lane into a sort of comic grotesque, capped off by the most ridiculous Nixon impersonator this side of Point Break. The interplay between Hoover’s past and present (“present” here being the early 1960s) also provides the film’s most effective recurring visual joke, in which a cross-dissolve repeatedly transforms DiCaprio and the strapping golden boy Hammer into their desiccated latter-day counterparts. Hammer, in particular, looks like a carnival-attraction mummy in his old-face, which lends his already impressive supporting performance as Hoover’s lifelong companion and soul mate Clyde Tolson an unexpected layer of poignancy, as he valiantly struggles to wring real tears from latex. Watts, as Hoover’s secretary and confidant Helen Gandy, fares better, mostly due to her relative lack of screen time. Her performance, age makeup be damned, is an understated marvel in a film that flirts with caricature at every turn.
                
Yet it’s this same inclination toward the grand gesture that makes J. Edgar worth discussing. When the simmering sexual tension between Hoover and Tolson finally boils over, it does so in a tremendously melodramatic glass-shattering, furniture-tossing outburst that leaves the mouths of both male leads smeared with blood like angry slashes of red lipstick. When an older, paranoid Hoover suspects Martin Luther King, Jr. of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, he clandestinely bugs King’s hotel room and is later shown in half-light, hunched over the reel-to-reel, his fantasies of King’s illicit encounters shown as imagined shadows on the wall, an exaggerated parody of white fears of black sexuality. Even Hoover’s cross-dressing is depicted here as an homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho, a distraught DiCaprio wrapping himself in his dead mother’s gown and clutching her necklace until it breaks and sends pearls clattering to the floor in slow motion. Make no mistake, this is not a subtle film. But it is a fascinating and surprisingly subversive one, especially coming as it does from one of the few remaining emblems of Hollywood’s conservative masculine ideal.
                
Indeed, this is a film obsessed with image, much like the character of Hoover, who is shown several times studying a portrait of Washington on the wall as he enters the Oval Office. Sure, he’s tried to uphold the ideals of the country he’s sworn to protect against any threat from within or without, but how exactly did he come to inherit those ideals? He tells his Mommie Dearest (played by an appropriately campy Judi Dench) she’s the only one he can trust, and we already know she’s a hateful bigot who deploys “daffodil” as a gay slur. What J. Edgar suggests, through the makeup and the stunt casting and the many meta-cinematic references (a scene of Hoover watching James Cagney in The G-Men serves as something of a response to Dillinger watching Manhattan Melodrama in Mann's Public Enemies), is that for these men, the personal and the political are inextricably linked. And as a climactic revelation implies, neither Hoover nor Eastwood can be trusted as a narrator. 

In J. Edgar, both Hoover and Eastwood are men in the twilight of their years, racing against death itself to rewrite the narrative of their lives and their country, even as they doubt that such revisionism is right or even possible. It’s telling that while the first words we hear are attributed to Hoover, the last belong to a supposed lover of Eleanor Roosevelt, the “horse face” Hoover sought to discredit in the eyes of the American people. We’re hearing DiCaprio’s voice as Hoover, reading the letter composed for the film ostensibly by Dustin Lance Black, writing under the guise of a woman lost to history, and somehow, through all those layers of artifice, what once invited ridicule seems almost devastatingly honest.

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