Culture Friday: J. Edgar

[don]

( a day early - I'll be gone for a week on the East Coast)

Finding the Humanity in the F.B.I.’s Feared Enforcer

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

To find the man hiding in plain sight, Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times), primarily by toggling between Hoover’s early and later years, his personal and public lives, while the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The film opens in the early 1960s with a shot of the Justice Department building, the original home of the bureau, establishing the location, as well as the idea that this is also the story of an institution. As Hoover croaks in the voice-over (“Communism is not a political party — it is a disease”), the scene shifts inside, where the camera scans the death mask he kept of John Dillinger, former Public Enemy No. 1, and then stops on Hoover’s pale face: a sagging facade.

Old, stooped, balding, his countenance as gray as his suit, Hoover enters while in the midst of dictating his memoirs to the first of several young agents (Ed Westwick) who appear intermittently, typing the version of history that he feeds them and that is dramatized in flashback. The earliest episode involves the 1919 bombing of the home of the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson), a cataclysmic event that — accompanied by terrified screams and a wide-eyed Hoover rushing to the conflagration — signals the birth of an anti-radical. Hoover, a former librarian, subsequently helps deport hundreds of real and suspected extremists; hires his lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and begins amassing secret files on possible and improbable enemies that, like a cancer, grow.

Without rushing — a slow hand, Mr. Eastwood likes to take his time inside a scene — the film efficiently condenses history, packing Hoover’s nearly 50 years with the bureau into 2 hours 17 minutes. By 1924, Hoover was its deputy; a few years later in real time, seemingly minutes in movie time, he meets Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”). Tall and impeccably groomed, Tolson is a golden boy who, here at least, physically recalls the 1920s tennis star Bill Tilden and quickly becomes Hoover’s deputy and constant, longtime companion. The men meet in a bar, introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Hoover blusters through the easygoing introductions, his eyes darting away from the friendly newcomer literally looming over him.

Later, Tolson applies for a job at the F.B.I. and is eagerly hired by Hoover, inaugurating a bond that became the subject of titters but that Mr. Eastwood conveys matter-of-factly, without either condescension or sentimentality. Before long Tolson is helping Hoover buy his suits and straightening his collar, and the two are dining, vacationing and policing in lock step. Tolson becomes the moon over Hoover’s shoulder, a source of light in the shadows. Even the ashcan colors and chiaroscuro lighting brighten. In these scenes Mr. Hammer gives Tolson a teasing smile and the naked face of a man in love. Mr. DiCaprio, by contrast, beautifully puts across the idea that the sexually inexperienced Hoover, while enlivened by the friendship, may not have initially grasped the meaning of its depth of feeling.

Mr. Eastwood does, and it’s his handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship that, as much as the late-act revelation of the pathological extent of Hoover’s dissembling, lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs. Mr. Eastwood doesn’t just shift between Hoover’s past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other. In one stunning sequence he cuts between anonymous F.B.I. agents surreptitiously bugging a bedroom (that of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a resonant, haunting presence seen and heard elliptically and on TV) and Tolson and Hoover walking and then standing alone side by side in an elevator in a tight, depthless, frontally centered shot that makes it look as if they were lying together in bed.

Although Hoover and Tolson’s closeness was habitual grist for the gossip mill, the lack of concrete evidence about their relationship means that the film effectively outs them. Certainly a case for outing Hoover, especially, can be made, both because he was a public figure who, to some, was a monster and destroyer of lives, and because he was a possibly gay man who hounded homosexuals (and banned them from the F.B.I.). But this film doesn’t drag Hoover from the closet for salacious kicks or political payback: it shows the tragic personal and political fallout of the closet. And Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black’s expansive view of human frailties means that it’s Hoover’s relationship with Tolson — and the foreboding it stirs up in Hoover’s watchful mother (Judi Dench) — that greatly humanizes him.

That humanization is at the center of the film, which, as the very title announces, is less the story of Hoover, the public institution, than of J. Edgar, the private man. It would take a mini-series to name every one of his victims and enemies, a veritable Who’s Who of 20th-century notables, and a book as fat as Curt Gentry’s biography “J. Edgar Hoover” to communicate the sweep of the man’s power and impact on history. In crucial, representative scenes, the film instead offers quick sketches of the more familiar Hoover — the top cop and hunter of men (always ready for his close-up); the presidential courtier and exploiter; the wily Washington strategist and survivor — who decade after decade fended off threats real and imagined, and foes like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan).

The official take on Hoover, or rather on the F.B.I., his sepulchral home away from home, has been told before, including in Hoover-approved howlers like the studio flick “The F.B.I. Story” (1959). At once a fascinating psychological portrait and an act of Hollywood revisionism, “J. Edgar” doesn’t set out to fully right the record that Hoover distorted, at times with the help of studio executives (including those at Warner Brothers, which is also releasing this film). Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

“J. Edgar” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence and language.

J. EDGAR
Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Dustin Lance Black; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Mr. Eastwood; production design by James J. Murakami; costumes by Deborah Hopper; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Brian Grazer and Robert Lorenz; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar Hoover), Naomi Watts (Helen Gandy), Armie Hammer (Clyde Tolson), Josh Lucas (Charles Lindbergh), Jeffrey Donovan (Robert F. Kennedy), Geoff Pierson (A. Mitchell Palmer), Judi Dench (Annie Hoover) and Ed Westwick (Agent Smith).

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/09...tml?ref=movies

[don]

Re: Culture Friday: J. Edgar

Famous Minds, Keeping Secrets


Armie Hammer, left, portrays Clyde Tolson, the associate director of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in Clint Eastwood's “J. Edgar,”

By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS


A. O. SCOTT Autumn is biopic season. This usually means a parade of costumed tributes to important dead people, whose lives are presented with respectable, stuffy sameness. Even when we are treated to glimpses of their private experiences, we also keep a respectable distance; the tumultuous inner lives of the great and infamous tend to lie beyond the reach of conventional cinematic biographies.

But in theaters right now there are a couple of movies that only look like ordinary specimens of the genre. “A Dangerous Method,” directed by David Cronenberg, might appear at first glance to be a sober, upper-middlebrow period drama about Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) and the early years of psychoanalysis. Similarly, Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” about J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), the long-serving and controversial director of the F.B.I., can sometimes resemble a dutiful march from its subject’s youth to old age, complete with antique clothes and cars and heavy makeup.

But a lot more is going on in these movies than the acting out of public and domestic episodes. “J. Edgar” and “A Dangerous Method” are movies about secrecy, about the psychological mechanism of repression, about the gap between the face that is presented to the world and the morass of desires, fears and contradictions that lurk behind that face. Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Cronenberg, in different ways, try to probe the obscure zones of their characters’ inner selves, to indicate truths about those people that cannot quite be seen or expressed in words.

How do they do it? Since Hoover, Freud and Jung can all be described as seekers and keepers of secrets — men in whom methods and madness combine — it is worth digging into how the filmmakers take us beyond the obvious and literal facts into more mysterious and troubling realms of meaning.

MANOHLA DARGIS I like both movies tremendously, but “J. Edgar” was the bigger surprise, and only partly because of how sensitively Mr. Eastwood conveys the relationship between Hoover and his longtime companion, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). For starters, there’s Dustin Lance Black’s ingeniously constructed screenplay, which oscillates between Hoover’s past and present, his personal and political lies and lives. Initially, the script resembles that of “Flags of Our Fathers,” Mr. Eastwood’s 2006 look at memory, history and the uses and abuses of patriotism, hinged to the famous photo of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. That film, too, moves between time frames to show how real events are transformed into historical narratives that can be politically and ideologically exploited.

“J. Edgar” advances this argument to stunning effect when — if readers haven’t seen the films, they may want to turn the page — Tolson reminds Hoover that the official history the director has narrated for his memoirs, a history that we’ve just seen in heroically adventurous scene after scene, is a fabrication. In flashback, the film revisits some of these crucial memoir milestones — like Hoover swooping in, gun in hand, to personally arrest the Lindbergh baby kidnapper — except that these flashbacks either look wholly or somewhat different from what we’ve watched. Sometimes Hoover is absent from the flashbacks (a cop actually nabbed the kidnapper); sometimes it’s a critical detail that’s absent, as with the white horse that Hoover portentously and falsely put at the scene of a major arrest.

As it turns out, Hoover is as unreliable a narrator as Humbert Humbert. It’s a brilliant coup of cinema that takes you in and out of another person’s consciousness. Instructively, each revisited milestone hinges on a matinee-idol image of the Heroic Hoover — avenger of murdered children, the people’s champion — that’s central to the counternarrative he dictates. In time, it becomes clear that he’s created this alternative history partly in response to popular gangster films like “The Public Enemy” and partly as a way to build political power, influence that would, among other dividends, protect his relationship with Tolson. Hoover transforms himself from a perceived weakling (bureaucrat, mama’s boy) into the macho headliner of the F.B.I. because, as we know, sometimes a gun isn’t just a gun.

SCOTT The reason we know that is because we learned it from Sigmund Freud! Speaking to Jung on board the ship that is taking them to America in 1909, Freud puffs his cigar (which is, of course, only a cigar) and says to his colleague, “I wonder if they know we’re coming — bringing them the plague.” The bacillus in question is the compulsion to seek out the covert meanings and messages in human behavior, especially in dreams, memories and stories. Including movies: it hardly seems like a coincidence that psychoanalysis and cinema should begin their conquest of modern consciousness at around the same time.

Meanwhile — or, to be precise, about 10 years after Freud and Jung arrive in New York Harbor — a young Hoover commences the project that will occupy the rest of his long life. He sets out to rid the United States of what he perceives as the threat of radical subversion, to modernize and centralize the nation’s law enforcement capacities and to consolidate his own power in Washington. Looking at the Hoover of “J. Edgar” and the Freud of “A Dangerous Method” side by side, you notice some traits they have in common: a dogmatic faith in reason and science that blinds them to the less rational aspects of their temperaments; a paranoid suspicion of enemies and underminers; a habit of blurring the boundaries between the personal and the professional.

The revelation you point to in “J. Edgar” is an example of what Freud might call the return of the repressed. That moment is also startling in the way events we had taken as literal reality are revealed to have been fantasy all along. In pointing this out, Tolson performs the role of analyst, gently and decisively disrupting the neurotic narrative of his “patient.” A lot has been written about the sexual nature (or not) of the Tolson-Hoover relationship. Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Black, who reportedly disagree on this matter, show that, whether or not there was sex between the two G-men, there sure was a whole lot of transference.

Which is the whole subject, in a way, of “A Dangerous Method”: the way desire imposes its logic in defiance of our attempts to tame or divert it. Jung falls in love with Spielrein, a patient who becomes a lover and a colleague, while both of them are drawn toward and repelled by the magnetism of Papa Sigmund. What fascinates me about this movie is the way that, unlike “J. Edgar,” it remains rigorously focused on the literal. No dreams, no flashbacks, no fantasies, at least none that we see. We see long, tense conversations and snippets of kinky sex, but the impulses and anxieties that impel this behavior remain invisible, waiting to be discovered and given shape by the subsequent parallel histories of psychoanalysis and cinema.

DARGIS Mr. Cronenberg doesn’t turn his characters’ dreams into representations here, true, the way he does with the hallucinations in “Naked Lunch.” Rather, in “A Dangerous Method” he functions as a kind of filmmaker-analyst whose characters are, in turn, patients (of a type) whose talk talk talk reveals the workings of the mind on the conscious level (expressed largely through their dialogue) and unconscious (expressed through the filmmaking). For instance, it’s possible to see the scene in which Jung asks his wife to free-associate for him — as Spielrein, his pet “hysteric” and patient, assists him — as a relay that echoes Freud’s concept of the psyche, in the sense that Jung (let’s call him the ego) will be forced to compromise between his wife (the superego) and Spielrein (the id).

Spielrein isn’t, of course, pure id (she learns and changes, for one), but she is the center of the pleasure principle in the story. (I like the association of Jung with the ego, because in one of her psychoanalytic papers Spielrein labeled the ego “the ominous despot.”) It may take a Freudian and a Jungian to unpack everything that Mr. Cronenberg puts into this movie, yet again and again you can see him turning ideas from Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology into cinema. In my favorite example he gestures toward Jung’s later integration of the Eastern concepts of a masculine principle and a feminine principle with a gorgeous overhead shot of Spielrein and Jung spooning in a drifting boat, their closely nested bodies suggestive of a yin-yang symbol.

SCOTT I think what “A Dangerous Method” and “J. Edgar” have in common is that they are fundamentally analytical. They take human personality not as a transparent, obvious phenomenon but as a problem to be worked out. Rather than tie up their famous subjects in neatly moralized biographical packages they dwell on complexities and ambiguities. What we see on screen does not always match up with what the characters say about themselves, and while this gap can be confusing it is also endlessly intriguing. You are not so much invited to admire or despise these people as to think about them. Which is not to say that the films are cold — they are full of feeling — but rather that they focus their attention on minds as well as bodies and feeling.

DARGIS It’s no wonder they’re not exactly critical favorites. What also connects them is that each explores sexual repression, specifically in how systems of power control and harm the female and gay male bodies at the center of these stories. The cost of this repression is transparent in “J. Edgar,” which persuasively suggests that Hoover hoarded other people’s sexual secrets because he was forced to hide his relationship with Tolson (including perhaps from himself). In “A Dangerous Method,” the fallout of such repression seems more modest, because it’s played out through Spielrein’s personal case history as a patient whose traumas trace back to her childhood, when she was whipped by her father. In each movie, a distinct connection is made between authoritarianism and sexual repression.

Spielrein escapes her father’s whip and lands in Jung’s asylum, finding liberation when she takes control of the whip, her sexuality and her mind. Hoover, by contrast, remains under the thumb of his mother and the patriarchal rule she upholds until he’s middle-aged, so it’s no wonder that he replicates his repressive family structure at work, where he’s Daddy dearest, Clyde plays the wife, and the F.B.I., as a character says in the film, is Hoover’s child. Perhaps filmmakers are exhuming these older stories of sexual repression as a way of taking on contemporary assaults, both close to home and abroad, against gay and women’s rights (from gay marriage in America to girls schools in Afghanistan). From one angle both movies look like they’re only about sex, but they’re also about terror.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/mo...ssion.html?hpw