Movie Review: "J. Edgar"

The new Clint Eastwood directed and Leonardo DiCaprio starring movie, "J. Edgar", was heavily advertised during the baseball playoffs, and those ubiquitous commercials had me convinced that this was a movie to see. It had so much going for it....a great director in Eastwood, perhaps the best actor of his generation in DiCaprio, and a subject, J. Edgar Hoover, that was ripe for controversy and, perhaps, some rousing action.

Sorry to say, the whole was not as good as the sum of its parts.

While Hoover certainly deserves credit for building the FBI into the elite crime fighting organization it is today, a case could also be made that Hoover was also one of the more evil figures in our history. Personally, I was interested to see how Eastwood, whose personal politics are somewhat right of center, might portray Hoover. Would he emphasize the crime-busting anti-Communist passion of Hoover? Would he gloss over the Hoover who wiretapped seemingly everybody and use those findings to blackmail several Presidents and Attorneys General into keeping him at his post as FBI director until the day he died?

Well, the movie does show Hoover, warts and all, and it also plays up Hoover's long term relationship with his #2 man at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson. Unfortunately, the movie, which is told in flashbacks as Hoover dictates his memoirs to a present day Agent, is somewhat disjointed, which makes it somewhat hard to follow. The colors in the movie also are washed out through much of the movie. Sometimes that works well, but I don't think it did here. As a fellow viewer said to me as we exited the theater, "I expected more."

One thing that did not disappoint was DiCaprio's performance. He is really a great actor. I haven't seen everything he's done, but I've never seen him be anything less than excellent in anything that I have seen him in. I also like Armie Hammer, despite some ridiculous make-up, as Tolson. Very good performance there.

One of the historical figures portrayed in this movie was Robert Kennedy, and this leads me to a pet peeve. Whenever the Kennedys are portrayed in movies or on TV, why must the actors speak with such obviously phony New England accents? Is it really necessary to use accents when portraying historical figures? Would it make the movie any less valid if Jack or Bobby Kennedy just, you know, spoke their lines without making you think you are watching a bad version of Rich Little on the screen? Don't know who the actor was who played RFK in this movie, but the "pahk-the-cah" affectations were distracting in the extreme. Maybe they should have had him wearing a Red Sox hat, too.