To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker's and the viewer's part: while even Invictus and the "Touched by an Angel" outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don't find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. ("And it's not just a game/They can't throw me away/I put all I had on the line," sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let's propose instead that the master of sepia's recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I've always read as Eastwood's last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima "varied," but it's only with J. Edgar that I've understood their spirit of generosity: It's such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can't help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn't.)

But as Black's script pushes into less textbook territory, so, thankfully, does Eastwood. The director prides himself on his commitment to shooting scripts as written, to the horror of screenwriters like Peter Morgan, who has all but disowned Hereafter, evidently based on his first draft. Nonetheless, in J. Edgar's case, this earnest and, again, possibly lazy adherence to the text pays off as the stiff, high-school pageantry of the first act gives way to the more enjoyably unhinged Hoover fanfic that Black increasingly devises. Some of this is odd stuff: I won't soon forget the image of a decrepit Hoover shrouded in darkness and huddled over a secret recording of a Martin Luther King Jr. sex tape, which his guilt-ridden puritan brain projects onto the wall in shadow puppets. (Credit must go to long-time DP Tom Stern for making this tableau at least as lyrical as it is ridiculous.) The Lindbergh episode, which starts as the worst of the film's longwinded and scattershot depiction of history, segues nicely into a schlocky police thriller--an early "X File," with young Edgar as Mulder. Usually irony-averse, Eastwood is surprisingly deft at keeping us guessing as to whether such heroics are unembellished or filtered through a crackpot messiah's late-life delusions.

All of this is diverting enough, but it's the film's depiction of Hoover's lifelong partnership with Tolson that's most affecting--and most unexpected, given Eastwood's usual prudishness. Hammer, so good as a pair of imperious wankers in The Social Network, has his work cut out for him here: much of the time, he's buried under a horrendous mound of latex that renders him a zombie Craig T. Nelson. Good on him, then, for investing his dandy Tin Man with a heart. Hammer's Tolson comes off at first as a living doll, a tall homme fatale Edgar spots across the room in his finely-cut suit. His transparency--"I've never been to the horse races!" he says, sincerely--brings out the best in Edgar, who's reduced in his presence to boyish expressions of admiration; it's nice to see DiCaprio in this honeymoon phase, enjoying a brief respite from his usual tortured widowerhood. This conjectural but by some accounts accurate depiction of their relationship, which grows over time from backslapping prep-school love to something like marriage, stands out as a gem rescued from the historical dustbin that Black is initially all too happy to simply bury his head in. In the end, though, this is a big-budget, speculative work of queer historiography, and while Eastwood's undiscerning stewardship dramatizes some truly clunky material for far too long, there's something admirable in how he stays the course, following Black into the movie he clearly wanted to make all along.-Angelo Muredda

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the critic

Published: November 11, 2011