We’ve all had the experience of watching a movie that just can’t get your cinematic rocks off.
Nonetheless, sometimes you can ignore plot holes or deranged narrative when the acting is too damn good to ignore. Examples that spring to mind are Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, or the impressive method orca in Free Willy. I went through one of these experiences last week watching the fragmented and grandstanding J. Edgar. Perhaps it was just leftover hostility from shouldering through a pulsing line of Twilight fans, but I couldn’t get into this movie – however, the performances of the two main actors ensured that it wasn’t completely forgettable.
J. Edgar (I’m sure it took one dynamic focus group to choose that title) is about the life and times of the FBI’s first and longest-running director, J. Edgar Hoover. The Hoovester is played from early life to death by the eternally-youthful Leonardo DiCaprio. The makeup job required to make this progression believable is remarkable but probably off-putting for those who still have Jack Dawson posters on their bedroom ceilings. To use some tasteful imagery, it appears as if Jack Nicholson has swallowed DiCaprio whole and then put on a wig.
Leo plays Hoover as a bit of a monstrous hero, constantly teetering on the edge of tyranny in a rocking chair forged from his own engorged sense of power. He’s got secrets about everyone – sexy secrets. Really, from what the movie implies, the man did nothing but sit in dark rooms listening to tapes of powerful people boinking. Ironically, this obsession with the clandestine may have grown from the skeletons in his own closet.
In a controversial move, director Clint Eastwood chose to turn up the volume of the whispered subtext of Hoover’s personal life by presenting him as a man deeply invested in a homosexual relationship with his colleague Clyde Tolsen. Armie Hammer (last seen playing everyone’s dream threesome, the Winklevoss twins, in The Social Network) transcends his Ken-doll looks and essentially murders your soul by playing Tolsen as a man simply aching for some shred of reciprocation from Hoover. Many people are upset at this speculation, but frankly it’s the most compelling part of the movie and reduced two of my companions to very ugly crying.
I spent the film pondering the validity of different questions raised by the film – was Eleanor Roosevelt really a lesbian? Did J.F.K. actually get frisky with a German spy? Is this film literally longer than the Spanish Civil War? But what I mostly thought about was why people were so offended by gay plot line. After all, this kind of queer revisionist view of history can only serve to shatter peoples’ notion that there really is such a thing as “the good old days,” when that era was really a cesspool of homophobia and discrimination.
They can keep their poodle skirts and smoking in spaceships. I’ll take Gay Pride parades any day.
