Clint Eastwood has built an impressive career out of making seemingly unsympathetic characters likeable. As an actor, he took a revenge-driven, pugilistic cop named “Dirty Harry”, and created a national icon. As a director (and an actor), he made heroes out of amoral gunslingers (“Unforgiven”) and crotchety old racists (“Gran Torino”).

 

By Noah Gittell

 

Clint Eastwood has built an impressive career out of making seemingly unsympathetic characters likeable. As an actor, he took a revenge-driven, pugilistic cop named “Dirty Harry”, and created a national icon. As a director (and an actor), he made heroes out of amoral gunslingers (“Unforgiven”) and crotchety old racists (“Gran Torino”).

 

Given the résumé, Eastwood may have seemed the perfect director to tackle the life of J. Edgar Hoover, a man who surely had more enemies than friends. But making a biopic about a man as complex and opaque as Hoover takes a director with the tenacity and passion to search each crevice of the subject’s life to find the humanity. With “J. Edgar”, Eastwood only skims the surface, hitting all of the well-known milestones, but after two-and-a-half hours, we still don’t know Hoover any better.

 

To get the story going, “J. Edgar” uses a narrative device common in biopics: the subject at work on his memoirs. Here, a retiring Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio in distractingly bad old-age makeup) tells his story to a series of young agents, who offer their services as typists to the outgoing director of the FBI. Hoover senses his reign of power is coming to a close, and he is seeking, through his memoirs, to define his own legacy and that of the agency.

 

But the film plays out less like a memoir and more like a greatest hits collection. Instead of searching through Hoover’s life to find the themes and incidents that defined him, we get a sketch of his life and times. We see how he tracked and monitored Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal life, investigated the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, sparred with Bobby Kennedy, and, of course, came to prefer a more feminine garb – but we never find out why. We also get a substantial glimpse at Hoover’s much-discussed personal life, specifically his close relationship with his mother (Judi Dench) and his ambiguous friendship with associate bureau director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).

 

An interesting film could certainly be made about such a powerful and enigmatic character, but Eastwood seems to have no perspective on the man at all. In one respect, it is to Eastwood’s credit that he never pigeonholes Hoover as a hero of the anti-Communism effort or a villain to those who fight for civil liberties. But a good filmmaker would show both of these perspectives; Eastwood offers neither. He straddles the line between personal and political, between left and right, and as a result, the film never coheres into a satisfying narrative, playing instead as a mere montage of Hoover’s life and death.

 

While it could be forgivable that Eastwood fails to make a coherent story of Hoover’s long and varied professional life, it is baffling that he cannot make hay out of Hoover’s personal life. What was the true nature of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson? Can Hoover’s sexual repression really be explained simply by his having had a disapproving mother? And what made Hoover so close to his mother in the first place? These are questions Eastwood does not bother to explore.

 

His portrayal of Clyde Tolson, in particular, is laughably superficial. Armie Hammer has undeniable star quality (he shined in a double role as the Winklevoss twins in last year’s “The Social Network”), but he is given precious little to work with. His character never develops beyond being a connoisseur of shoes, interior decoration, and tie selection.

 

The weak screenplay wastes some terrific on-screen talent. DiCaprio gives it his all, and it’s hard not to admire the effort he clearly put into the role. But he has never been a transformative actor, and he is the wrong choice to play Hoover. As much as any other leading man, DiCaprio conveys a youthful aura, and it is unsettling to see him lead the film as a man in his 70s. Hammer’s performance suffers from the same problem. Playing the young Tolson in flashbacks, he glows, but he is never believable as a septuagenarian stroke victim.

 

We ask little of a biopic but to make us leave the theater with some new insight into the subject and the events within. Here, the irony is rich: this is the story of a man who revolutionized the way we investigate crime in America. The shame is that the filmmakers showed no interest in investigating Hoover’s life with the same qualities – tenacity and creativity – that made him an icon.