G-Men: A love story
Passing through the lobby after watching Clint Eastwood’s latest, J. Edgar, I overheard a couple dudes discussing the movie. “Pare, that’s not how I remember the FBI from TV…” They must have been flashbacking to the scene where Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) is being violently kissed by his No. 2 Man, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), on a hotel room floor.
Yes, this biopic about the famed FBI director is not your daddy’s FBI. It’s not even Mulder and Scully. We all know by now that Hoover was a peculiar man, tenacious and “fussy,” as one character describes him; most likely gay (certainly a “confirmed bachelor”) and possibly a cross-dresser; vindictive and racist, by some accounts. Yet he created the FBI, an organization that centralized investigation techniques, gathering a network of data, fingerprints and now DNA to prosecute more criminals. Hoover then used those same powers to spy on his (many) enemies through wiretaps and transcripts, and to accumulate enough dishy dirt to retain his post as head of the FBI through eight presidencies. Blackmail and surveillance are really opposite sides of the same coin.
Leonardo DiCaprio takes on the pudgy aging makeup in Eastwood’s biopic, reciting J. Edgar’s “life story” to a series of junior FBI men who are willing to take dictation and act obsequious around a bureaucrat whom many felt was the most dangerous man in the country.
How dangerous? He coyly threatens US Attorney General Robert Kennedy with wiretap recordings of brother Jack bonking a Russian mole in a hotel room. He gathers transcripts of lovey-dovey pillow talk between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a female communist. And he threatens to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. with recordings of the civil rights leader having sex in a hotel with a woman other than his wife.
The common denominator here is sexual secrecy, and Hoover was a G-Man with enough legal powers to break down the walls of privacy.
Hoover, it is known, had secret files on practically everyone in power who had committed indiscretions. Yet he himself took his secrets to the grave.
Here director Eastwood, who tackles American history in many of his films with an eye that some find dull or sentimental, but I actually find intriguingly off-center, is not interested in painting Hoover as a simple bad guy, a bulldog with a Federal Agent badge. Ol’ Clint many not make the most exciting movies in Hollywood, but he does take care with his subjects and often throws a different shaft of light on well-worn topics.
DiCaprio, ignored by the Oscar nominations, turns in a performance that mines his usual strengths, yet still leaves Hoover a mystery, a man of false fronts, a man without a core, much like his portrayal of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Here, it’s harder to accept the fact of young DiCaprio in sparse hair, 30 pounds heavier, and liver-spotted aging makeup. It takes a while to settle into his performance as the older Hoover. But eventually he creates a character that elicits both sympathy and revulsion, sometimes at the same time — no easy feat.
J. Edgar (even the first-name title seems an attempt to humanize the man) starts his career in a lowly government post, fighting stateside radicals seeking the overthrow of a capitalist regime (like the Occupy Wall Streeters, except with bombs instead of Twitter accounts). He wants the power to deport commies and “degenerates,” and badgers the US Attorney General to expand his fledgling outfit’s budget and manpower: he believes fingerprinting will create a national network to help locate criminals at a time — 1919 — when few view it as science.
But he’s also an opportunist: when he notes that the public prefers James Cagney gangster movies to real “coppers” who spend their lives tracking down criminals, he amps up the FBI’s PR machine, sending his men after John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone and the rest. Headlines follow. The fact that J. Edgar never actually lifts a gun or makes an arrest gets lost in the fog of Hoover’s selective memory.
We get glimpses of the G-Man lifestyle, as Hoover envisions it: male, college-educated, clean-cut and “unattached” to family or female company. In other words, closeted gay male, circa 1940. In one scene, Hoover gathers his tall, well-groomed G-Men in a room that looks like a GQ spread: among them is Hammer (you may remember him as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, but you’ll hardly recognize him in over-the-top aging makeup as Agent Tolson). He and Tolson have a “connection,” and in one hilarious scene the younger G-Man takes Hoover to his upscale tailor. G-Man makeover! Cue Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman!
The relationship is played “straight,” which is to say Hoover and Tolson never get past a few held hands or angry kisses on a hotel floor. Part of this, the script (by Milk writer Dustin Lance Black) hints, is because Hoover’s demanding, sickly and religious mother (Judi Dench) hates homosexuals (“I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil as a son,” she coldly tells J. Edgar after he refuses to dance with a woman) and the G-Man wants, above all, to please his mother. In fact, when he eventually dons her pearl necklace and dress after her demise, we can’t help thinking of Norman Bates, and a whole bunch of unintentionally hilarious associations ensue.
A thankless role goes to Naomi Watts as young secretary Helen Gandy, who initially catches J. Edgar’s eye and remains his loyal assistant through five decades, even (it’s alleged) personally shredding his famous “secret files” before Nixon’s men can confiscate them.
Along the way, the FBI, under Hoover’s ever-watchful eye, is depicted as an efficient organization guided at the top by the principles of gossip and scandal: if it’s salacious and juicy, it’s probably worth opening a file on it. There’s a split personality to Hoover’s world: meticulous and serious on the surface, addicted to tsismis right beneath. Perhaps this was simply the reality of the closeted gay male in the mid-20th century. Or maybe the old goat just wanted to be loved: there’s a telling moment when Hoover stands out on his office balcony overlooking a parade passing down a Washington, D.C. boulevard: he sees someone waving from a motorcade, and instinctively waves his arm, as though somehow he’s been recognized as a part of history passing by. But no one waves back; in fact, he’s invisible to the public eye.
Director Eastwood is a split personality himself: a gruff action star who embodied reactionary politics in early films like Dirty Harry (inspiring even Ronald Reagan to borrow quotes), he started critically examining American violence in films like Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven; his historical films like Flags of Our Fathers or Letters to Iwo Jima cast a skeptical eye on official history, while films like The Changeling and Gran Torino look at people caught up in struggles of gender (Angeline Jolie institutionalized for being a “bad mother”) or race (inter-Hmong violence in LA). J. Edgar is, by contrast, all over the map: it never commits to a final version of Hoover, which may reflect the secrecy that still swirls around his personal and professional life. You may not buy DiCaprio as the most tenacious FBI chief in history, but the fact that Hoover’s career-long, er, Hoovering up of dirt included everyone from Emma Goldman and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping to Martin Luther King’s persecution just makes it a more interesting story.
