J Edgar

Saw J Edgar, a biopic about J Edgar Hoover, creepy autocrat of the FBI from the 20s to the 70s. Rumors of cross-dressing and secret homosexuality have dogged Hoover's legacy and this film treats these rumors as both fact and as keys to the Hoover mystery. He is shown to be a petty man, compiling dossiers on anyone and everyone who criticized him, conflating his interests with the interests of America (as powerful paranoiacs are wont to do.) His is a very interesting character and I think has more interesting things going in his head than in his bedroom. I found the central position of the homosexuality kind of off-putting. It may well be true, what do I know, but must we pretend that that's the start and end of his personality?

Anyway, the film is very restrained, dealing with a man in the midst of writing (well, dictating) a self-aggrandizing memoir, talking early on in the film of his character in the book, of building sympathy for the "heroes" and of ensuring the reader knows who the "villains" are. In this film Hoover takes both roles, nobly building an empire to keep America safe, but ensuring that safety via extrajudicial means, with wiretaps and threats and blackmail. His grand goals are belied by his actual pettiness and smallness however. This is underscored in a scene where he discretely blackmails FDR with his wife's secret homosexual affairs in order to get more funding to find the Lindbergh baby. FDR, with the rising threat of the Nazi to worry about, is completely indifferent to personal embarrassment and to missing babies. Hoover crows about this encounter later, with his boyfriend.

An august film, not one of my favorites. It's a bit too dry for me and yet also too melodramatic when it comes t Hoover's sex life. After a whole film of gray beards and talking heads, it's a bit ridiculous to see shout-y gays rolling around, angrily smooching. The film seems to attempts a sort of Oscar-bait capital-I-Importance, but seems like just so much respectful posturing to me, so much hot air. Eh.