Review: "J. Edgar" Still an Unsolved Case

A sprawling and ambitious attempt to capture one of the last century's most puzzling and polarizing figures, J. Edgar seems to be aware that its own undertaking may be an impossible one. Despite grounded, nuanced performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts and Judi Dench and a genuine respect for the shrouded love story that makes up its emotional core, the film is a muddy, rambling curiosity punctuated by moments of moving emotional clarity, awkward laughs and glaring missteps.

Beginning in 1919 and spanning to his death in 1972 at age 77, J. Edgar takes a scrapbook approach to piecing together the varied and at times mysterious elements of the life of the man who, among other things, is generally credited with the creation of the FBI.

Instead of telling Hoover's story in a linear fashion, the film jumps frequently and abruptly backward and forward, glancing off of events with similar themes and drawing out a few central storylines to feature-length arcs. As a result, J. Edgar the precocious pitbull - given the reins of the Bureau of Investigations while still in his twenties - rubs shoulders with J. Edgar the paranoid wiretap fanatic who launched a vicious personal attack on Dr. Martin Luther King on the eve of his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and also J. Edgar the hoodlum-busting comic-book-and-newsreel huckster of the 1930's.

DiCaprio and Hammer

The major threads (the search for the Lindbergh Baby; his relationships with longtime deputy and companion Clyde Tolson, played by Hammer, and his secretary Helen Gandy, played by Watts) thankfully hold up relatively well under the dizzying non-linear approach. But the few times where the temporal jumps really click (one scene where Hoover and Tolson enter an elevator as old men and emerge from it in their twenties, for instance) only serve to give a glimpse of the movie that might have been had the material been handled differently.

For the most part, the approach doesn't work. What emerges from the frantic scrambling of events is less a portrait and more a series of disparate events tied together by a single unlikable man. Hoover is not presented in a particularly sympathetic light - not to say that he should be, but spending just a few hours with the man is such a chore that it's impossible to imagine why lifelong confidants like Tolson and Gandy suffered his toxic, rapid-fire company for entire decades.

We see glimpses of Hoover's genius: the man did revolutionize criminal investigation and introduce modern forensics, and he pioneered the Federalization of kidnapping laws in to protect children state-to-state. But these accomplishments are overshadowed by his crippling paranoia, his merciless hounding of other public figures whom he believed to be harboring sexual secrets (Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. King, President Kennedy), and his obsession with his own public image.