"J. Edgar"

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• Chris O. says:

  November 8, 2011 at 9:46 pm

  I guess we’ll see all “in the tank” talk for HUGO, too? Those two dir­ect­ors yield it the most, it seems. Might as well get it all over with with­in a couple of weeks from each other.
  Good review, Glenn. I’m anxious to see it.

• lazarus says:

  November 8, 2011 at 10:26 pm

  Well the good news is that I don’t have a prob­lem with Scorsese auteurists!
  Glenn, I wish you would have taken my friendly jab (and not-exactly-subtle ref­er­ence to Wells’ post from last year re: Invictus or whatever yawn-inducing film Clint released that induced the accus­a­tion) as some­thing less than a cred­ib­il­ity challenge.
  Don’t feel too bad. The cur­rent Cahiers du Cinema gang put Gran Torino down as the 4^th best film of 2009.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  November 8, 2011 at 10:30 pm

  I’m just messin’ with ya, Laz.The blurb really DID catch me off-guard though, and made me wanna kiss the Ol’ General. I know, aiiieee.

• WG says:

  November 8, 2011 at 10:52 pm

  I too gen­er­ally liked the film – my review runs tomor­row – and I too feel pree­mpt­ively per­se­cuted for dar­ing to not-hate it. Radical pos­i­tions! Hidden agen­das! Maybe, deep down, the WWW is really just like the FBI…

• Scott says:

  November 9, 2011 at 2:41 am

  Nice review. I really did­n’t care for Clint Eastwood’s last two movies, so I was think­ing of just giv­ing this a pass, but Mr. Kenny has per­suaded me to check it out! (I’ll also make a note of that book, which sounds good.) As for Eastwood dir­ect­ing a film that even his most fer­vent par­tis­ans will hate, his next pro­ject is reportedly a remake of “A Star is Born” star­ring Beyonce! I mean, if that does­n’t do it…
  And being accused of bad faith by Jeffrey Wells isn’t that bad. At least you don’t have Jonathan Lethem com­ing after you! This is veer­ing off-topic, but for those who haven’t read it, Lethem’s dis­gruntled essay about a mixed review he received by James Wood, kindly reprin­ted by the L.A. Review of Books, is a very inter­est­ing read:
  http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12467824780/my-disappointment-critic

• David Ehrenstein says:

  November 9, 2011 at 9:12 am

  http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2011/11/08/all-dressed-up-to-go-dreaming/

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  November 9, 2011 at 10:49 am

  I rather appre­ci­ate that your good review has all the mater­i­al for a bad review of, well, just about any Eastwood movie—I don’t think you’re in the tank, just unbothered by exactly the things that make my skin crawl. “Stiffly sol­emn all the way down to its desat­ur­ated col­or palette…, too much of the time the dia­logue is a little bit on the but­ton.” It’s all that respect­able, white-elephant, reach­ing for author­ity that bugs me, and I’m always a little sur­prised to see such a fan of the dis­rep­ut­able okay with the blatant respectable-liberal-Oscar-bait that infests Eastwood’s movies, but it’s hardly a crime, just a remind­er that we all con­tain multitudes.

• AeC says:

  November 9, 2011 at 11:35 am

  Rocchi lost me the instant he referred to a two-and-a-quarter-hour run­ning run­ning time as “leviath­an.”

• Brian Dauth says:

  November 9, 2011 at 1:49 pm

  In the con­text of recent dis­cus­sions, Jeffrey Wells’ remarks help to fur­ther define the widen­ing gulf between the “go-with-my-gut” type of crit­ic­al approach versus one that uses con­sidered thought, expert­ise, and deep famili­ar­ity with an artist’s work to arrive at a con­sidered, nuanced opin­ion. The élite ignores its gut, instead rely­ing on its high­er func­tions to form crit­ic­al opin­ion (such a gay way to be a crit­ic. A man goes with his gut). Telling is Wells’ ver­dict that “… J. Edgar is a mod­er­ately bor­ing film, at times in an almost pun­ish­ing way. Mostly because it’s a pro­found drag to spend time with such a sad, clenched and closeted tight-ass.” I won­der if Wells would also object to “Macbeth” since regi­cides aren’t known for being all that fun (Benjy Compson is prob­ably also on his must-to-avoid list, since who could learn any­thing from an idiot).
  Rocchi’s review is just as mys­ti­fy­ing with its plaint that “… J. Edgar func­tions as a Wikipedia page dipped in makeup, an assemblage of half-truths, gos­sip, innu­endo and the occa­sion­al his­tor­ic­al fact, all drenched in latex and drained of col­or.” But if the post­mod­ern turn has taught us noth­ing else, it has high­lighted the fact that his­tory is gos­sip and innu­endo writ large. He frets that “Eastwood’s film and Dustin Lance Black’s screen­play shove all these big (and cur­rently rel­ev­ant) ques­tions aside for fluff. Their major con­cern: was Hoover really a closeted homo­sexu­al and occa­sion­al cross-dresser?” I must respect­fully dis­agree: examin­ing the power­fully neg­at­ive effects that sexu­al repres­sion can have on a per­son in terms of both their own lives and the beha­vi­ors they dis­play toward O/others is any­thing but fluff.
  And then there is David Denby’s bizarre com­ment about Black being an “act­iv­ist gay screen­writer” (as if all artists were not act­iv­ists of one sort or anoth­er), fol­lowed by his writ­ing at the end of his review that “[g]ay act­iv­ists may be dis­ap­poin­ted by the film­makers’ restrained assump­tions about Hoover’s sexu­al­ity … ” which renders Black a gay act­iv­ist screen­writer who has failed to be a gay act­iv­ist. The mind is sent reeling.

• Michael Healey says:

  November 9, 2011 at 4:34 pm

  Wait: who’s that in the pic­ture above, DiCaprio or Clint Howard?

• Eddie Carmel says:

  November 13, 2011 at 1:26 am

  Just saw it, and agree with your assess­ment, Glenn…though I actu­ally wish Donovan had chewed the scenery a little more as Bobby K: it actu­ally felt to me like he was under­play­ing, or that Black’s script was in that moment, which may have seemed wise con­sid­er­ing there have been entire TV movies about Bobby Kennedy and Hoover (ser­i­ously, and more than one: a curs­ory glance at IMDB shows Hoover as being played in these by Jack Warden, Ernest Borgnine, and Enrico Colantoni. Now THAT’S a part with range!)
  That said, the somber­ness of the pic­ture was fre­quently inter­rup­ted by mas­ter­ful moments, like the edit­ing of the bugging/wiretapping begin­ning, cross-cut with Hoover and Tolson in the elev­at­or and the thirty-year-time jumps…a scene that I would­n’t have thought in Eastwood’s par­tic­u­lar bag of tricks and all the more impress­ive for it. DiCaprio’s late in the game deliv­ery of the line “Shut up, Clyde” enhanced the over­all exper­i­ence for me, as did the two lines they gave to Richard Nixon, lines which in their choice pro­fan­ity were unex­pec­ted, hil­ari­ous, and lead to an ulti­mately poignant end­ing of a pecu­li­arly mov­ing film.
  Oh, and you were right about the “we shall nev­er let down our guard” line. That was a beauty.

• Hollis Lime says:

  November 13, 2011 at 6:45 pm

  That pro­fane line from Nixon at the end is sup­posedly exactly what he said in real life.

• Bettencourt says:

  November 13, 2011 at 7:15 pm

  I tend to think a lot of people on this site, includ­ing our esteemed host, over­rate Eastwood as a dir­ect­or, though I think UNFORGIVEN was one of the best American films of the 90s, and I was hugely impressed by the Iwo Jima films.
  Despite this, I was very impressed by J. EDGAR, which I saw yes­ter­day – ambi­tious, fas­cin­at­ing and genu­inely mov­ing. I still wish he’d get someone else to score his movies – though MYSTIC RIVER was the only of his films were the score actu­ally made the film worse, rather than hav­ing little impact either way.
  For those jones­ing for some Armond White-bashing, The Onion has a column on White’s latest rave: for JACK AND JILL
  http://www.avclub.com/articles/its-time-for-armond-white-to-explain-why-everyone,65051/

• AdenDreamsOf says:

  November 19, 2011 at 2:14 pm

  Last year, I went on a J. Edgar Hoover read­ing binge. After learn­ing about how mer­cur­i­al, bril­liant, and com­plic­ated Hoover was through Bryan Burrough’s book “Public Enemies”, I imme­di­ately read the defin­it­ive Hoover bio “The Man and The Secrets” by Curt Gentry. What fas­cin­ated me so much with Hoover was that he is such a tra­gic fig­ure: his para­noia, resent­ments, insec­ur­it­ies, and oth­er issues are what made him so power­ful and influ­en­tial while also hold­ing back his growth as a human being. He did many immor­al and cor­rupt things in his life, but my impres­sion of him through those books was that he wanted to do good but lacked the per­son­al skills to reflect and under­stand the per­spect­ives of oth­ers to do so.
  I liked Eastwood’s film, but here are some things I think the film gets wrong:
  1. I don’t think Hoover’s mom was any­where near as con­trolling or dom­in­eer­ing as the film por­trays her. Hoover’s fath­er died under cir­cum­stances related to men­tal ill­ness when Hoover was young, and it was Hoover’s choice to look after and live with his moth­er. He wanted to pro­tect her and did not want her to be alone, and she didn’t seem to pres­sure him to stay with her. Hoover was ashamed of his father’s men­tal instabil­ity which might have been part of the reas­on he grew up to put suc­cess before his own emo­tion­al needs.
  2. The film did a poor job of paint­ing the dynam­ic between Hoover and Martin Luther King. Hoover resen­ted King because Hoover felt King wanted to pro­mote com­mun­ist val­ues. Near the end of King’s life, Hoover decided to give King a final chance, invited him to his office, and the two of them spoke for a long time. Hoover left their meet­ing think­ing he had bur­ied a grudge and made a friend. What King didn’t know was that he was being bugged by Hoover. When King went home and was asked how the meet­ing went, King replied “The old man talks too much” which Hoover over­heard over the wiretap. After that, Hoover gave the FBI instruc­tions not to warn King’s camps of any assas­sin­a­tion threats which was their policy before King cemen­ted Hoover’s grudge for good.
  3. The cross-dressing scene is com­pletely made up. I real­ize it was put in the film for emo­tion­al pur­poses, but it ignores the most pro­found com­plic­a­tion and enigma related to Hoover’s files: people of power were afraid of Hoover’s files because they didn’t know what was in them and rumors star­ted about Hoover may have been the res­ult of that same fear. People could only live in fear of what he knew and what he didn’t know. Some his­tor­i­ans think that the rumor’s of Hoover’s homo­sexu­al­ity and cross dress­ing are the res­ult of rumors star­ted to malign Hoover much in the same way he used rumors and secrets to con­trol and bully others.
  Anyway, that’s my long his­tory les­son for the day.