Eastwood might be the most underrated director out there right now. Never spoken of as an auteur, but pumps out a movie or two every year despite being 1000 years old, could probably still kick the ass out of every other director in Hollywood, and always gets solid performances out of his actors. (Except in Gran Torino, but one can only do so much with untrained teenagers.) That said, I don't make it a point to see his movies, as they often focus on subject matters that don't interest me.
J Edgar looked pretty promising, despite the obvious makeup. DiCaprio is always good, Eastwood is usually good, and J Edgar is a controversial figure I know little about. As promising as it looked, it received mediocre reviews upon release. Luckily, someone else I knew wanted to see it, so I tagged along. Otherwise it would have been a rental sometime next year.
The movie attempts to cover 50 years of J Edgar's life in a little over two hours. We start with J Edgar advancing in years, around the time JFK enters office. Let's call this "real time." Inter-spliced with real time is flashback time, which occurs while J Edgar dictates his autobiography to an FBI underling. We see his rise through the ranks from a lowly agent to running the department and convincing congress to arm and fund his bureau's activities, which includes hunting down communists and gangsters. We also see the three major people in his life: his homophobic mother, his dutiful secretary, and his partner Clyde Tolson.
I was moderately interested in the movie because they discussed many events in American history of which I have no knowledge, like communist bombings in the 1900s. There's also a considerable amount of time spent on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which I know happened, but never bothered to hear details.
However, as interesting as some of it was, it's dry and kinda boring. I don't think they found the dramatic center to J Edgar's character. DiCaprio plays the role well, but I never felt a sense of empathy or understanding for his character. He was kind of a dick the whole way through and I was never given a reason to make me think that, just maybe, he's a dick for a good reason.
Good actors all around, including Judi Dench and Naomi Watts; Armie Hammer is dreamy (until his stroke) as Tolson; Stephen Root gets in there as an awkward wood specialist; Josh Lucas plays Lindbergh; Burn Notice guy plays Robert Kennedy; and some guy from Gossip Girl plays one of the FBI underlings that initially Hoover likes, then inexplicably gets rid of.
First Viewing: 2+2+3+2+2 = 11