http://www.economist.com/node/21538668AUDIENCES expecting a hard-hitting exposé will have the rug pulled out from under them by “J. Edgar”, Clint Eastwood’s biopic about the long-serving founder of the FBI, masterfully played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Film critics have been especially curious about how Mr Eastwood would portray the private life of the original Dirty Harry. Is Hoover shown wearing a dress? (Yes, but…) Does the film portray his rumoured love affair with his aide, Clyde Tolson? (Absolutely, but…)
The screenplay, by Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black, hopscotches across the decades, requiring a sizeable cast. Yet this is an intimate, interior story of a man who merges truth and self-aggrandising fictions. Thus it is immaterial that the FBI’s slight involvement in the Lindbergh kidnapping case becomes the backbone of the memoir that Hoover is dictating in the film, or that Alvin Karpis, a gangster, was, if truth be told, arrested by someone other than Hoover. The memoirist’s habit of stealing credit from others to burnish his crime-busting image has infected the narrative. Mr Eastwood is slyly amused by the energy that America’s top cop puts into seeing his exploits glorified in films, comics and even on cereal packets, until the underlying sadness of it all rises up and becomes the film’s real subject.
At heart, “J. Edgar” is a love story between two men: the ferocious bulldog sitting atop his empire of wiretaps and blackmail and the handsome young clothes-horse he made his longtime companion without ever daring to become his lover. Already gay enough to use the word “camp” circa 1940, Clyde (Armie Hammer) loves more than he is loved in return, thanks to the repressions instilled in Edgar by his ambitious mother (Judi Dench). But his love never wavers, and neither does Edgar’s. Forget “Brokeback Mountain”, with its distracting scenery. Mr Eastwood’s camera bores straight into his characters’ souls, discovering the sweetness hidden inside his monstrous protagonist. His “J. Edgar” turns out to be one of the most beautiful and affecting gay love stories to come out of Hollywood.
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