A Secret Life

The Complications of Character in Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar

            What’s striking about J. Edgar, the most recent offering from Clint Eastwood, is the complications existent in the layered personality of the title character, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, portrayed by an explosively determined Leonardo DiCaprio – whose granular croak can take some getting used to – is painted as a character whose need to seek security and power stems from a two pronged void planted within him both by his mother and himself, a deficiency in character that leads him to act in ways deemed less than heroic. In an early scene flashing back to his childhood, his mother (wonderfully animated by Judi Dench) tells him that one day he’ll be ‘the most powerful man in the country,’ in a sense determining (and imprisoning) young Eddie to that unattainable goal. This void becomes offset, after a number of scenes detailing Hoover’s growing awareness of his homosexual yearnings, by a riveting scene in which he tries to vocalize his sexual identity – ‘I don’t like dancing with women!’ he irately vocalizes to his mother – only to hear her stoically intone that ‘I would rather have a dead son than a dandelion for a son.’

            The portrait that emerges is a man demonized by his need to fulfill an acerbic mother’s promise for him to become the country’s most powerful man while being withheld from pursuing love due to the dishonor and loathing it’d inevitably elicit. This incongruity paints a portrait of a man ravaged and withheld, determined to accomplish regardless of the cost or effect it may have on him.

            The film sputters back and forth between Hoover’s last weeks in his position of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as he dictates the recollections of his life to young, male agents (a different one each time) crafting his biography and the real-life recreation of the situations he describes. Historical events that Hoover was directly involved in lend these recollected scenes a sense of authenticity, including the deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son and ultimate arrest of kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and other landmark events under Hoover's tenure as FBI director, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

            But the centerpiece of the film that brings Hoover’s complexities into sharp focus is his relationship with his companion and co-worker Clyde Tolson, played by Armie Hammer (who lit up the screen as the Winkelvi in The Social Network). Their relationship is one of constant company – they rarely miss a meal together from the beginning of their work together – with underlying shades of mutual attraction, desire, and repression.
           The confusion with which Hoover stumbles through trying to understand his sexual identity as well as the discomfort he experiences around female courtiers is evident in his interactions with Tolson. A scene which serves as the initial culmination of their under-the-table flirtations between the pair, in which Tolson tells Hoover that he loves him, ends with the two of them punching one another in the face before Tolson drags Hoover to the floor and plants an aggrieved kiss on the clenched lips of his boss, who warns him from ever attempting that sort of behavior again. It’s great cinema, full of passion and pain, and highlights the repression in which Hoover felt compelled to live, and which inadvertently dragged Tolson down with him. Though tough to watch at times, the complexity of the character of Hoover makes for a transfixing take on one of the most interesting, multi-faceted public American figures of the twentieth century.