J. Edgar (2011)
Nov. 17th, 2011 10:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyJ. Edgar. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 2011.
I saw this last Friday. I think it's a good movie, and worth seeing, but I also think that it's not anywhere near as accomplished technically as most of Eastwood's movies.
When my students asked me in class yesterday what I thought of it, my first answer was honestly, "Well, it's not my American century," and it's true. J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with crime and his warped vision of American society gives the movie a very particular perspective on the 20thC, and I think the central problem of the movie is that it sticks so close to Hoover (most of the movie is told through the device of him dictating his highly unreliable memoirs to a succession of young agents in the 1960s) but is still critical of him, but there's not really enough space in the film to do both. The critical take works best in the movie's present, from roughly 1961-1970; there's no more damning indictment of Hoover than the scene in which he sits alone in his office closet (!) listening to wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex with a woman in a hotel room and gets the phone call that JFK has been shot, about which his FBI had done nothing proactive because of Hoover's obsessive focus on domestic "communists." Significantly, when Nixon is inaugurated in 1969 and Hoover goes in to threaten the president into playing ball via the secret files, we see Hoover break down completely in the face of the fact that (we're told) Nixon greeted him not with surprise at the files' existence but a blunt question about what was on him in the files: Hoover had finally met his match, because you can't play a player. The New Yorker review by David Denby opined that Hoover was actually weirder than Nixon, the weirdest man on the American scene in the 20thC, and I'm not sure I actually agree with that (Nixon was pretty damn weird), but it's telling that Nixon seems to have an instinctive grasp of Hoover and how he operates.
We've come around to the fact that this movie, as The New York Times review noted, essentially "outs" Hoover (I can't believe that this isn't more well-known, but I'm a historian who reads slash, what the hell do I know) and his lifelong relationship with Clyde Tolson. I think it's possible and valid to criticize Eastwood for not going far enough in his depiction of their relationship (there's shades of the "good queers who don't have sex" canard in the movie's interpretation), but on the other hand, there's absolutely no historical evidence either way as to whether Hoover and Tolson had a physical relationship, and Roy Cohn, whose word about closeted people I'd be inclined to trust on the face of it, at one point apparently said Hoover was too repressed to have a normal relationship of any kind. So from that perspective, Eastwood actually sticks fairly close to the facts as they are known--and in the process does firmly establish Hoover as horrifyingly sympathetic.
The three leads give good performances, particularly Armie Hammer after Tolson's stroke and Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy in general: she makes a deal with the devil she knows, and devotes herself to it, and we can see that in her with frightening ease. I do question the initial portrayal of Tolson's character (why do they continually talk about clothes, fashion, etc), but from a cinematic rather than a historical perspective because I know so little about this aspect of the period. Hoover's mother, memorably embodied by Judi Dench, also presents a uniquely American twist on the "horrible mother" trope.
I do think the movie is essentially counting on the audience having seen movies such as Public Enemies, and I think one reason why the movie doesn't gel is that it starts too late: why the hell did Hoover switch from being a librarian to working for the Department of Justice? Why the hell was he so obsessed with communists? The movie can't answer, or doesn't convey its answers convincingly. Like Public Enemies, J. Edgar makes a strong, though subtler, connection between repression and information science, between the rise of governmentality and the creation of the modern police force. Tellingly, unlike John Dillinger, Hoover believes in (and tries to create) his own press.
I saw this last Friday. I think it's a good movie, and worth seeing, but I also think that it's not anywhere near as accomplished technically as most of Eastwood's movies.
When my students asked me in class yesterday what I thought of it, my first answer was honestly, "Well, it's not my American century," and it's true. J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with crime and his warped vision of American society gives the movie a very particular perspective on the 20thC, and I think the central problem of the movie is that it sticks so close to Hoover (most of the movie is told through the device of him dictating his highly unreliable memoirs to a succession of young agents in the 1960s) but is still critical of him, but there's not really enough space in the film to do both. The critical take works best in the movie's present, from roughly 1961-1970; there's no more damning indictment of Hoover than the scene in which he sits alone in his office closet (!) listening to wiretaps of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex with a woman in a hotel room and gets the phone call that JFK has been shot, about which his FBI had done nothing proactive because of Hoover's obsessive focus on domestic "communists." Significantly, when Nixon is inaugurated in 1969 and Hoover goes in to threaten the president into playing ball via the secret files, we see Hoover break down completely in the face of the fact that (we're told) Nixon greeted him not with surprise at the files' existence but a blunt question about what was on him in the files: Hoover had finally met his match, because you can't play a player. The New Yorker review by David Denby opined that Hoover was actually weirder than Nixon, the weirdest man on the American scene in the 20thC, and I'm not sure I actually agree with that (Nixon was pretty damn weird), but it's telling that Nixon seems to have an instinctive grasp of Hoover and how he operates.
We've come around to the fact that this movie, as The New York Times review noted, essentially "outs" Hoover (I can't believe that this isn't more well-known, but I'm a historian who reads slash, what the hell do I know) and his lifelong relationship with Clyde Tolson. I think it's possible and valid to criticize Eastwood for not going far enough in his depiction of their relationship (there's shades of the "good queers who don't have sex" canard in the movie's interpretation), but on the other hand, there's absolutely no historical evidence either way as to whether Hoover and Tolson had a physical relationship, and Roy Cohn, whose word about closeted people I'd be inclined to trust on the face of it, at one point apparently said Hoover was too repressed to have a normal relationship of any kind. So from that perspective, Eastwood actually sticks fairly close to the facts as they are known--and in the process does firmly establish Hoover as horrifyingly sympathetic.
The three leads give good performances, particularly Armie Hammer after Tolson's stroke and Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy in general: she makes a deal with the devil she knows, and devotes herself to it, and we can see that in her with frightening ease. I do question the initial portrayal of Tolson's character (why do they continually talk about clothes, fashion, etc), but from a cinematic rather than a historical perspective because I know so little about this aspect of the period. Hoover's mother, memorably embodied by Judi Dench, also presents a uniquely American twist on the "horrible mother" trope.
I do think the movie is essentially counting on the audience having seen movies such as Public Enemies, and I think one reason why the movie doesn't gel is that it starts too late: why the hell did Hoover switch from being a librarian to working for the Department of Justice? Why the hell was he so obsessed with communists? The movie can't answer, or doesn't convey its answers convincingly. Like Public Enemies, J. Edgar makes a strong, though subtler, connection between repression and information science, between the rise of governmentality and the creation of the modern police force. Tellingly, unlike John Dillinger, Hoover believes in (and tries to create) his own press.