J. Edgar

Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black follows up his Oscar-winning script for Milk, the profile of the short-lived, openly gay California politician, with a companion piece of sorts: a biopic of Milk’s polar opposite, J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover held the position for nearly 50 years, wielding immense power while leading an intensely closeted personal life. Under the sure direction of Clint Eastwood (at 81, as prolific as ever, helming approximately a film a year for the past decade), Black’s nonlinear script presents itself as a didactic history lesson, with Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio, inhabiting the part, body and soul) narrating his story via the memoir he’s dictating to underlings. Where J. Edgar connects with viewers, however, is on an emotional level, charting the man’s complicated love affairs—with his mother, with his secretary, with his deputy and with his country.
The film begins near the end, as Hoover attempts to secure not only his own legacy but the Bureau’s reputation by telling his side of the story, a tale rife with heroism and villainy, patriotism and paranoia. Through fluid flashbacks, he recalls his entrée into crime-fighting with the Bolshevik invasion in 1919, his appointment to director of the Bureau of Investigation, the gangster wars of the 1930s, his thorough files on subversive threats real and perceived, his development of a centralized fingerprint database, and his misunderstanding and underestimation of the Civil Rights Movement. Eastwood doesn’t pander to his audience with subtitles explaining where and when each scene takes place, but it can cause confusion until one falls into the rhythm of the narrative.
Aiding the transitions, of course, is the transformation of DiCaprio from a young, virile man in his mid-20s to an old, declining man in his 70s, a conversion that called for dark contacts and facial prosthetics even when the actor was playing close to his age. Overseen by Sian Grigg, this process, albeit not seamless, combined with DiCaprio’s disappearance into the role, allows for the suspension of disbelief.