by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed Charles the 2011
biopic J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood
and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover, which got released with some
amount of ballyhoo last year — and sank without a trace at the box office. I
thought it was an excellent movie — I generally have liked Eastwood’s films as
director in which he has not also appeared as an actor, and this was no exception — though I can see
why it got almost no traction commercially. First of all, virtually nobody in
the movie audience of today either knows or cares who J. Edgar Hoover was — for
someone who was part of American life for so long (he directed the Bureau of
Investigation of the Department of Justice — later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI for short, after a
1935 bill passed Congress adding the F-word to the name — for an amazing 48
years, from his initial appointment in 1924 to his death in 1972) — and second,
while the central issues raised by Hoover’s FBI tenure are still very much
alive in the body politic, they’re hardly ever debated or discussed.
The ongoing
debate in American history over the relative demands of liberty and security
was definitively settled in favor of security almost as soon as the dust
settled from the 9/11 attacks; though Hoover may have been dead for 29 years
when the USA PATRIOT Act passed Congress, his spirit was definitely alive and
well, and there’s a positively chilling moment early on in the movie in which
Hoover, taking his secretary Helen Gandy on a date to the Library of Congress
where he shows her how meticulously he has organized his card catalog, muses on
the possibility of keeping a card file on every person living in the United
States and collecting every possible scrap of information on them that would be
useful in determining whether they would ever commit a crime or become a
Left-wing activist (which, to Hoover, were pretty famously the same thing).
It’s impossible to listen to this and not reflect on the fact that in the 40 years since Hoover’s death, computer
technology has become so advanced that keeping a dossier on every American
(indeed, on virtually every person in the world — at least every person in a country developed
enough to have telephones) with the kind of derogatory information Hoover
wanted encoded for all time has become entirely possible. We laugh today at the
activities of the KGB, the East German Stasi and the other intelligence
agencies of the Communist world that recorded every phone call made in their
countries on the ground that they couldn’t possibly have had time to listen to
every recording — the spy agencies in these countries were quite open about the
domestic espionage; they wanted their people to live in constant fear that your recorded conversation would be the one they
happened to listen to that day — but with computers and programs that scan
written documents, Internet searches and recorded conversations for so-called
“key words,” it is entirely possible to put a whole population under
surveillance 24/7 and collect the information Hoover wanted and thought was
essential to maintaining internal peace and social order.
It has its flaws; the
central gimmick by which the aging Hoover is supposedly dictating his memoirs
in the 1960’s to an FBI amanuensis variously referred to as Agent Smith (Ed
Westwick) and Agent Garrison ignores the fact that Hoover had been consistently
publishing books under his byline since Persons in Hiding in 1938 (the alibris.com Web site has a copy sans dust jacket for $106.25 and a signed copy for $225), his account of the FBI’s famous
war against the gangsters of the 1930’s (Paramount bought the movie rights and
got four films out of Hoover’s narrative, and used the title Persons in
Hiding for the first film ever
made about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, with Patricia Morison as Bonnie and
J. Carroll Naish as Clyde) and his most famous one, Masters of Deceit: What
the Communist Bosses Are Doing to Bring America to Its Knees (1958). While there’s almost certain agreement
under historians that Hoover didn’t write these books himself, there seems to
be some dispute as to who did; most scholars credit them to Louis Nichols, the
head of the FBI’s public relations department, but
the Web site www.icdc.com attributes Masters of
Deceit to “Agent Fern Stukenbroeker, an
FBI researcher on subversive groups employed in the Crime Records Division” —
but the point is that Hoover was already a published author (or at least his
name was) well before the 1960’s and he had already had plenty of experience
recasting the history of himself and the FBI both to glorify his own and the
Bureau’s reputation and to establish, to paraphrase Louis XIV, that “Le
Bureau, c’est moi.”
Also, while Dustin
Lance Black’s screenplay is excellent in many respects — it hints at both
personal and political motives for Hoover’s actions and attitudes (his
screwed-up relationship with his mother, marvelously played by an almost
unrecognizable Judi Dench, seems to be Black’s idea of Hoover’s “Rosebud,” and
his participation in the raids ordered by Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A.
Mitchell Palmer [Geoff Pierson], against foreign-born and in some cases
American-born radicals in 1919-1920 to get them out of the country without any
bothersome niceties like due process — which generally goes unmentioned by
Hoover’s apologists — is a key part of Black’s view of the man in that it shows
him as a hard-line Right-winger willing to use the full force of the federal
government to suppress the Left from the outset of his career, not as someone
who effectively fought crime in the 1930’s and then went off the rails faced
with the Communist threat of the 1950’s) — it also drops a lot of hints that
viewers unaware of the history of the period and some of the connections
between the events he includes probably wouldn’t get. For example, the film
shows Hoover and his assistant, companion and lover, Clyde Tolson (Armie
Hammer), enjoying the hospitality of the Del Mar racetrack (he was allowed to
keep his winnings but his losses were quietly forgiven) and taking criticism
from attorney general Robert Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) for not using the power
of the FBI against the Mafia, but you’d really have to be a hard-core student
of the period to understand the connection: the Mafia was blackmailing Hoover
over his relationship with Tolson (which seems surprisingly diffident and
stiff-upper-lip in this film; much to Eastwood’s credit as a director, he
doesn’t “de-Gay” Hoover the way a more homophobic director like Oliver Stone
would have, but he also doesn’t have Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer slobber
all over either) and his willingness to take favors from Mob-connected
enterprises.
At the same time Black’s screenplay is understated and lets us discover for ourselves the connections between the events
of Hoover’s time and the similar issues in our own without hammering them home
in overly explicit speeches or situations. And Eastwood’s direction is superb,
almost noir in its relentless darkness;
as I’ve noted before, most actor-directors are good at getting fine, subtle
performances from their casts (even actor-directors who as actors were
unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles) but few (Stroheim
and Welles are the only others I can think of) are such masters of visual
atmosphere. We really get the impression that Hoover’s FBI was a zone of almost
total isolation, not only from the rest of the government but from the rest of
humanity; indeed, watching this film while I’m in the middle of reading Janet
Reitman’s book Inside Scientology made
it readily apparent how much Hoover’s FBI was like a cult, with an all-powerful
dictatorial leader ordering his underlings to live up to his ideals not only
professionally but even physically (in an early scene, shortly after he takes
over the Bureau, he fires an agent for having a moustache — unlike most
martinet bosses, he doesn’t even give the poor guy a chance to shave it off and
keep his job!) and summarily getting rid of anybody else in the organization
(like Melvin Purvis, the agent who actually led the attack that killed John
Dillinger — Hoover’s attack on him was so relentless Purvis’s son wrote a book
about it called Vendetta) who seemed a
threat to his power or public standing.
At the same time it shows Hoover
creating the so-called “secret files” with the assistance of Helen Gandy —
whose relationship to him seems to confirm Nora Ephron’s comment about Rose
Mary Woods: that the long-term secretaries to the powerful literally fell in
love with their bosses, albeit in a non-sexual way, and gave them fanatical
lifelong devotion — and using the sexual secrets of presidents, their spouses
and their families to make sure he kept what he wanted, not only the
directorship of the FBI but utterly unaccountable power. In many ways it’s
ironic that this film was made at Warner Bros., of all studios, since it was
Warners more than any other film company that contributed to Hoover’s
propaganda campaign, which burnished his image to the point that even many
liberals in the early 1950’s upheld Hoover as the responsible anti-Communist
fighter in the government as compared to Joe McCarthy (whom Hoover denounces as
an “opportunist” in this film’s dialogue, reflecting the distrust true
believers generally have for those they perceive as camp followers). The film
counterpoints two actual Warners movies from the 1930’s, The Public Enemy (1931) and G-Men
(1935), as social indicators of how the Zeitgeist shifted from glorifying gangster heroes like the one James
Cagney played in The Public Enemy to
glorifying the FBI agents that went after them — like the one Cagney played in G-Men. Warners was also the studio that produced the 1960’s TV
series The FBI (supposedly Hoover
reviewed every script personally until he died while the show was still on the
air) and made the film of Don Miller’s hagiographic history The FBI Story in 1958 (and to get the rights to The FBI Story and Hoover’s cooperation in making it, Warners also had to
buy the movie rights to Masters of Deceit
even though all Jack Warner’s production executives were personally aware that
Hoover’s ghostwritten anti-Communist diatribe was unfilmable).
And J. Edgar is also beautifully acted; Leonardo DiCaprio’s (lack of)
height makes him as suitable to play Hoover as he was unsuitable to play Howard
Hughes in The Aviator, and he’s
believable as both the utterly self-righteous public Hoover (for an actor to
make so one-dimensional a character interesting is itself an achievement) and
the pathetically twisted private Hoover (and though it’s a pretty manipulative
bit of writing on Black’s part I loved
the touch of Hoover listening to a sex tape of President Kennedy when he
receives a phone call that the President has been shot and killed — and he
still has the tape on in the background when he coldly and without any attempt
to soften the blow calls Bobby Kennedy to break the news to him); though his hair is slicked-down instead of curly,
DiCaprio otherwise looks astonishingly
like Hoover and he really carries himself (which he didn’t in Titanic) as a
man living in a different time from our own. Paradoxically, J. Edgar is too long (137 minutes) in some ways and too short in
others — too long for an average moviegoer to sustain interest in a movie
without caped crusaders from a comic book or spectacular CGI action scene, too
short for screenwriter Black to connect the dots he leaves tantalizingly
hanging in his script — but it’s an excellent film and an example of the finely
honed serious movie there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for in today’s
cinematic marketplace.
