Movie Review: J. Edgar
J. Edgar Hoover hated communists, Blacks, and Jews and simply
loathed Lithuanian-born Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, whom he had
deported to Russia in 1919, although she was a U.S. citizen. But the two
were curiously conjoined; both by American history and their
polar-opposite politics; Goldman’s anarchism was inspired by the Chicago
Haymarket Riots of 1886, while the future FBI chief’s understandably
hysterical fear of domestic communism stemmed from the Cleveland, Ohio
May Day Riots which happened shortly before he threw her out. Hoover,
then head of the U.S. Department of Justice General Intelligence
Division, said of Goldman and her lover, Alexander Berkman, that they
were, “Beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this
country and return to the community will result in undue harm."
The riots and Goldman’s deportation are among early scenes in J. Edgar, the compelling, sometimes unbearably intimate and occasionally sympathetic portrait of Hoover drawn in Clint Eastwood’s new film.
As I saw the movie in Israel before it opened in the U.K. and had read a reasonably positive review in The New York Times, I could not understand why it received no mention at the Golden Globe awards nor even one Oscar nomination. Surely, I mused, both Eastwood’s direction and Leonardo DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance as Hoover deserved a prize, despite the film being overlong, some of the prosthetics poor, and its non-linear approach often difficult to follow.
Then I discovered why it had been ignored: the majority of critics have denigrated it quite ruthlessly, so smothering it at birth. There has been only scant, grudging attention paid to how Eastwood coped with the sweep of almost 80 years of history, encompassing waves of massive social unrest, gangsterism, a world war, the incumbencies of eight U.S. presidents, and how the development of forensics allowed Hoover to create a scientific crime detection laboratory. This showed him as a man a half century before his time, such work resonating today, not only because of DNA profiling (genetic fingerprinting) but in arguments over the use of a digitised/biometric National Identity Register, which scheme has just been abandoned in the U.K, while in Israel a biometric database of all Israeli citizens is presently under trial.
The riots and Goldman’s deportation are among early scenes in J. Edgar, the compelling, sometimes unbearably intimate and occasionally sympathetic portrait of Hoover drawn in Clint Eastwood’s new film.
As I saw the movie in Israel before it opened in the U.K. and had read a reasonably positive review in The New York Times, I could not understand why it received no mention at the Golden Globe awards nor even one Oscar nomination. Surely, I mused, both Eastwood’s direction and Leonardo DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance as Hoover deserved a prize, despite the film being overlong, some of the prosthetics poor, and its non-linear approach often difficult to follow.
Then I discovered why it had been ignored: the majority of critics have denigrated it quite ruthlessly, so smothering it at birth. There has been only scant, grudging attention paid to how Eastwood coped with the sweep of almost 80 years of history, encompassing waves of massive social unrest, gangsterism, a world war, the incumbencies of eight U.S. presidents, and how the development of forensics allowed Hoover to create a scientific crime detection laboratory. This showed him as a man a half century before his time, such work resonating today, not only because of DNA profiling (genetic fingerprinting) but in arguments over the use of a digitised/biometric National Identity Register, which scheme has just been abandoned in the U.K, while in Israel a biometric database of all Israeli citizens is presently under trial.
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