Leonardo DiCaprio in Clint Eastwood's excruciating J. Edgar
If you've ever wanted to watch Dirty Harry murder Jack Dawson, J. Edgar
is your movie. In this agonizing biopic of the late FBI despot, closet
case and aggressive compiler of the nation's secrets, director Clint
Eastwood smothers Leonardo DiCaprio under makeup and padding right
before your eyes. And he's got an accessory: Milk screenwriter
Dustin Lance Black, who allows the movie's version of J. Edgar Hoover to
exhale endless self-justifying speeches without taking in new air.
As J. Edgar marches from the 1920s all the way up to Nixon, changing its look only marginally along the way, Black's screenplay confines its subjects within that hoariest of biopic structures, the speculative flashback. But not speculative enough: Shown as younger men, DiCaprio and Armie Hammer (as Clyde Tolson, Hoover's confidante, who would have made a better lens for this material) radiate prettiness and irony, not the longing that would have given this tedious behind-the-Bureau rehash an emotional force.
Clouded by colored contacts and further dimmed by cinematographer Tom Stern's suffocating desaturation, DiCaprio's eyes flash signs of a panicked intelligence. Is that the paranoid FBI Caesar in there, or is it a relaxed, feline performer recognizing too late that he's stuck in a stiff dog of a movie? As a revisionist study of perhaps the most powerful lawman in U.S. history, Eastwood's dour J. Edgar sits across the law-and-order aisle from Michael Mann's pushy but no less self-conscious Public Enemies.
In both Eastwood's melodrama and Mann's, wardrobe and CGI evoke an alluring, stylized nostalgia that may be the movies' most striking feature. But it's a longing not for the eras the movies depict but for the rough-and-tumble studio pictures concurrent to them. When DiCaprio's Hoover addresses a movie audience from a newsreel that dissolves into a preview of James Cagney in The Public Enemy, Eastwood is answering Mann, in whose movie Johnny Depp's Dillinger watches a similar short that instructs the crowd to look around the theater for lurking villains.
That's as alive as things get here, though. In scenes of Hoover and Tolson's later years, with each actor glumly vulcanized, J. Edgar becomes an unwelcome hybrid of The Sunshine Boys and Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County. The sight of DiCaprio, Hammer and Naomi Watts (as Hoover's longtime secretary Helen Gandy) pantomiming through heavy latex stirs pity for the actors more than sympathy for the conflicted figures in their care. It's enough to make you wish for Oliver Stone.
As J. Edgar marches from the 1920s all the way up to Nixon, changing its look only marginally along the way, Black's screenplay confines its subjects within that hoariest of biopic structures, the speculative flashback. But not speculative enough: Shown as younger men, DiCaprio and Armie Hammer (as Clyde Tolson, Hoover's confidante, who would have made a better lens for this material) radiate prettiness and irony, not the longing that would have given this tedious behind-the-Bureau rehash an emotional force.
Clouded by colored contacts and further dimmed by cinematographer Tom Stern's suffocating desaturation, DiCaprio's eyes flash signs of a panicked intelligence. Is that the paranoid FBI Caesar in there, or is it a relaxed, feline performer recognizing too late that he's stuck in a stiff dog of a movie? As a revisionist study of perhaps the most powerful lawman in U.S. history, Eastwood's dour J. Edgar sits across the law-and-order aisle from Michael Mann's pushy but no less self-conscious Public Enemies.
In both Eastwood's melodrama and Mann's, wardrobe and CGI evoke an alluring, stylized nostalgia that may be the movies' most striking feature. But it's a longing not for the eras the movies depict but for the rough-and-tumble studio pictures concurrent to them. When DiCaprio's Hoover addresses a movie audience from a newsreel that dissolves into a preview of James Cagney in The Public Enemy, Eastwood is answering Mann, in whose movie Johnny Depp's Dillinger watches a similar short that instructs the crowd to look around the theater for lurking villains.
That's as alive as things get here, though. In scenes of Hoover and Tolson's later years, with each actor glumly vulcanized, J. Edgar becomes an unwelcome hybrid of The Sunshine Boys and Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County. The sight of DiCaprio, Hammer and Naomi Watts (as Hoover's longtime secretary Helen Gandy) pantomiming through heavy latex stirs pity for the actors more than sympathy for the conflicted figures in their care. It's enough to make you wish for Oliver Stone.
Comments
Post a Comment