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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