J. Edgar

(Movie Review)

            I’ve got mixed feelings about this film. On the whole I’m glad I watched it, and I appreciate its ambition.  But at the same time, the story lacks forward momentum, and can be hard to sit through.

           

            To be fair, it’s a difficult subject to condense into a 2 hour movie.

            Biopics in general can be difficult to do as movies, because real life doesn’t always follow the classic Hollywood 3 act structure.  Most people’s lives are a series of unconnected events rather than a continuous story that is leading up to a single climax followed by a tidy resolution.

            Of course some lives adapt themselves to movies easier than others.  With movies like Spartacus or Braveheart, it’s pretty clear what the central conflict should be, and where the final climax should fall.

            But the life of a government bureaucrat doesn’t lend itself to screenwriting.  Hoover served for 48 years under 8 Presidents, and during that time was involved in some way with most of the political or social events of the United States.  But how do you make one single story that combines the Palmer raids, the Lindbergh Kidnapping, prohibition, the gangster era, Hoover’s vendetta against Charlie Chaplin, World War II, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi Freedom Summer murders, the Vietnam War, student radicals, the Black Panthers, Cointelpro, Nixon, and, of course, Hoover’s famous vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr.?  (And that’s only to name a few of the events Hoover was involved with.)

            What approach would have worked best for a J. Edgar Hoover biopic is still an open question.  I think a J. Edgar Hoover biopic is worth doing, but I’m still not quite sure what the best way around the problem would be.

            What I can say, however, is that this film doesn’t work.  It tries hard, and it makes some decisions that I’m sure must have looked good on paper, but in the end it just doesn’t add up to an engaging film.

            The first problem is that this film focuses too much on J. Edgar Hoover’s personal life. 

            It’s an understandable mistake.  The film is trying to humanize J. Edgar Hoover, and portray him not simply as a monster, but to understand what made him tick.         

            This is a common problem with Hollywood biopics.  And yes, it does help to humanize J. Edgar Hoover by showing he had relationship issues in his private life.  But it’s possible to overplay this.  We all have relationship issues in our life.  The thing that makes Hoover’s story unique and worth telling is not the fact that he had mother issues or that he formed an attachments to another man—no one would have cared about any of that if Hoover had died an anonymous businessman.  The thing that makes Hoover’s story worth telling is how it impacted our history, and the relationship issues are interesting only in so far as they shed light on Hoover’s historical actions.

            Unfortunately, although the film spends a great deal of time on Hoover’s personal life, the film never makes a connection between Hoover’s personal life, and his actions as the director of the FBI.  (Or at least no connection that I could see.  If I’m missing something, let me know in the comments section.)

            Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson at times threatens to become the main focus of the film, and make all the historical events look like simply little incidents that happened along the way of our main story: Hoover and Clyde and their unrequited love for each other.

            Also, since the exact nature of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson’s relationship is the subject of speculation, it’s my understanding that most of what the film portrays between them is just the screenwriter’s imagination, and not historically accurate at all, including that big, ridiculous, drawn out, overly melodramatic scene of them fighting in the hotel room.

            So that’s one problem.

            The other problem is the narrative structure of Hoover dictating his memoirs, which causes the movie to jump around in time.

            I’ll admit there are some clever ideas here.  And it was an interesting Rashomon like touch to show how Hoover’s memories of historical events always differed from what really happened. 

            The implication was that Hoover had been telling listening to his own propaganda and lies for so long that he had begun to believe it, but (in what I’ll admit is a clever move) the audience isn’t let in on this until near the end of the film.

            But this cleverness comes at a cost, and in my opinion the negatives outweigh the positives.  Jumping around in time, and revisiting the same events, just kills any forward momentum the film might have had.  It fragments Hoover’s story even more, and makes it impossible to get absorbed in the story.

            So, those are my criticisms.

           

            On the other hand, even though this film never came together as a coherent narrative, there were parts of it I found fascinating: the Palmer raids, the deportation of Emma Goldman, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case (and the resulting media circus), the development of criminal science, Hoover’s attempts to take personal credit for all arrests made by the FBI and his vindictiveness against any other FBI agent who became too famous, Hoover’s blackmailing of American presidents, and Hoover’s pathological hatred of Martin Luther King, and his attempts to discredit King—all fascinating.

            And for that reason, despite all the film’s flaws, I’m going to give it a cautious recommendation anyway.  It is worth seeing, even if it is a little hard to sit through all 2 hours.  (Perhaps it’s best watched in segments rather than all at once.)

Was the Film Too Nice to Hoover?

          There are a couple of reviews on Salon [links HERE and HERE], that accuse this film of white washing J. Edgar Hoover by leaving out all the really nasty stuff he did—for example, the infamous Cointelpro (W) program which Hoover’s FBI used to sabotage black radicals and which, in some cases, even went as far as assassination against prominent Black radicals (W) is completely absent from this movie.

           

            Was Cointelpro, and the other similar abuses, left out of this movie because Hollywood is too conservative to reveal the whole truth?

             Or was it left out because you just can’t include everything in a two hour movie?

            Or perhaps a bit of both?

            At the very least, I’ll give this film credit for not shying away from Hoover’s attempts to destroy Martin Luther King. 

            Although back in his own day Martin Luther King was hated by conservatives, nowadays Martin Luther King is considered an American icon.  So, if you’re trying to tell a story to a mainstream audience, and you’ve only got two hours, and you want to do it economically, and you haven’t got time to get into the whole history of Black radicalism and Cointelpro, then simply showing J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to destroy Martin Luther King is a nice short hand way of conveying the message: this guy’s gone too far.  You don’t really need to show a lot more than that—once he’s on the wrong side of Martin Luther King, he’s lost the sympathy of the audience.  So I’m inclined to cut the movie some slack on this one.

           

            (…of course that being said, it is a travesty that most Americans don’t know about the history of Cointelpro because the schools and the media never talk about it, and,like a lot of other things in history, this just gets swept under the rug.  But that’s a separate issue.)

            At any rate, this movie is an improvement over previous movies like Mississippi Burning, which re-wrote history to make the FBI the champions of the Civil Rights Movement.

            On the same subject, here’s a note from Wikipedia, here is a small historical fact note:

Stockham notes that Hoover probably did not write the FBI's notorious letter to Martin Luther King Jr., saying, "While such a letter was written, Hoover almost certainly delegated it to others within the Bureau."

            I can understand why the movie wanted to have J. Edgar Hoover himself dictate the letter—from a cinematic standpoint that scene of J. Edgar Hoover yelling out that letter to his secretary makes for much more interesting viewing than a scene of Hoover delegating the task.

            And yet, from a historical standpoint, it’s worth remembering the letter was delegated, because it means that the FBI’s attempts to destroy Martin Luther King wasn’t just limited to Hoover’s personal idiosyncrasies, but was something the whole organization was responsible for.

            (The movie Mississippi Burning, for example, attempted to explain away Hoover’s hatred of Martin Luther King as something that didn’t really affect the rank and file members of the FBI, which the movie portrayed as the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.)

           

Notes

* The movie, and the DVD extra featurette, both made a big deal about how J. Edgar Hoover was responsible for making the use of fingerprints mainstream in criminal investigations.

            I’m not sure about the exact history of this.  It may well be that J. Edgar Hoover made the process mainstream, but as far back as 1894, the idea of using fingerprints to solve mysteries was already appearing in Pudd’nhead Wilson by MarkTwain.

* The first Gulf War happened when I was in 7th grade, and Norman Schwarzkopf was in the news a lot back then.  I remember my history teacher at the time pointing out to us that Norman Schwarzkopf"s father, Norman Schwarzkopf senior, was the very same police officer who had bungled the Lindbergh kidnapping case.  (Just something I thought about when Schwarzkopf appeared briefly in this movie.)

* One of the interesting things I learned from Sideshow by William Shawcross is that after the wave of campus violence following the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon’s team favored a surveillance program of American citizens that was so invasive that it appalled even J. Edgar Hoover, who refused to even sign the document until he had all his objections typed out onto it, and quickly rescinded parts of it afterwards.  (See sections quoted in my review of Sideshow by William Shawcross).

            It was interesting to read that Hoover, of all people, was being the voice of caution in the room.

            I’m not sure if this was the general pattern throughout the Nixon White House, or not, but this movie also implies that Nixon’s team was so ruthless it surprised even Hoover.

* I wish the story of J. Edgar Hoover's relationship with Clyde Tolson would have taken up less time in this movie.  Nevertheless, I admit to being educated.  I previously had no idea who Clyde Tolson is.  Now that I know, I'm better able to understand who that mysterious figure was with J. Edgar Hoover in other movies, such as Oliver Stone's Nixon.

Link of the Day

The Highest Degree Odious - PATRIOT, Cointelpro & Watergate