J. Edgar by Dustin Lance Black - Nine out of 10

J. Edgar by Dustin Lance Black

Nine out of 10

As a republican, Clint Eastwood is an outlier in Hollywood and in the present, he seems to belong to a party that has lost its marbles – for someone who has had the misfortune to live in a communist dictatorship – and with Ceausescu at the helm it was one of the worst – being on the right of the political spectrum makes sense, but not for the organization led by a fool, crook and liar like Trump.

In his marvelous book Intellectuals, Paul Johnson exposes the excesses, despotism, cruelty of some of the world’s greatest minds, from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Leo Tolstoy, from Henrik Ibsen to Hemingway and many others.

Therefore, we should not concern ourselves with the grave mistakes made by Eastwood the political man and concentrate on the magic that the filmmaker delivers.

If we can.

Trump supporters would be thrilled to watch the films of a director, actor and producer that speaks at the Republican conventions to promote the image of their presidential front men, but for someone like this viewer, unconsciously there would be a tendency to look with a very critical eye to the works of the one who delivered some of the most famous lines in cinematic history…

“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

J. Edgar is also about the importance of the law, different from Dirty Harry, but with a number of similarities, given that the Inspector Callahan was a determined, action figure dedicated to fighting crime by all means – sometimes shooting dead criminals, even if that meant breaking the law – and J. Edgar Hoover was another, arguably more important character in the fight against crime, with an ambiguous ethical stand.

An actor who needs no introduction plays the leading role, of a man that seems to have been a repressed homosexual, complicated figure that played a paramount part in creating, building up the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is so much attacked in an era of a leader that speaks about witch hunts, detests the agents working there and for people like this viewer he is clearly a Russian asset – it may be without his knowledge, for stupid, corrupt and vicious as he is, he could well look for profits above all else, without caring or understanding that he promotes the interests of Putin and undermines his country by saying he believes a tyrant over his own intelligence agencies.

Hoover meets early on with Helen Gandy aka Naomi Watts, a young woman that he proposes to, but she refuses stating that she is concerned with her career at that stage and anyway, they had only just met – they would remain very close, for she would become his private assistant and as such it seems that she had the key to special files that the head of the FBI kept on various – perhaps all – important public figures, wives of presidents and presidents themselves.

In one scene, Hoover meets with Robert Kennedy, the then head of the department of justice, the Attorney General who supervises the FBI, and he talks about his obsession with the communist threat – with hindsight, considering the Russian interference in the American elections, the victory that they may have delivered for the idiot candidate, with hacking of the democratic emails and more, the collusion of most of the Trump team, the late head of the agency seems to have been correct and the old cold war enemies are even in the present actively undermining the United States.

When J. Edgar meets Clyde Tolson aka the impressive, great Armie Hammer, he appears to be enamored – at least in this perspective of events proposed by this film – he wants to have him work for the Bureau, albeit there are elements in his file that would have prevented his employment were it not for a personal, emotional interest in the man who saw the FBI as a temporary step to be followed by a career in the private sector, where he would open an office.

The relationship between the two is described as a passionate love affair – that could have been platonic, we do not know for sure – with long periods of serenity and possible bliss, interrupted by scenes, such as the moments after a congressional hearing in which the head of the Bureau is exposed as a man who takes all the credit for the caught gangsters, but he has never arrested any of them in person, which was a rather lame accusation given the fact that we cannot expect the CEO or leader of a big organization, the head of an army to be asked to get in the line of fire and thus do great harm to his outfit.

The two friends, perhaps lovers, have other scenes of fighting, Clyde talks about the lies that J. Edgar had told, the exaggerations to which he was given, the spiteful manner of his attacks and demands for the firing of special agents involved in high profile arrests, such as the one of Dillinger, envious and spiteful, describing to the public the way Charles Lindbergh came to greet and shake hands with him when the abduction of his child was investigated – whereas the truth was that the Nazi sympathizer, yet marvelous aviator refused to see the one he called a little man.

J. Edgar Hoover was a complicated man and this makes for a more intriguing saga, where the merits of the one that has built the bureau from scratch, creating a scientific laboratory in what used to be the smoking parlor, facing a shortage of funds, powerful gangsters and enemies are balanced by his intrigues, illegal taping of criminals and innocent people with power that he could blackmail if it served his mean, personal purposes.

Fighting communists is a noble purpose, but exaggerating and labeling ordinary people for no reason is already a jump in the other camp, that of the scoundrels and mobsters that the FBI has been investigating and apprehending for so long – as to its future, we have to see what the Orange Clown and his acolytes will do, given that the Bureau has indicted so many of the allies of the Russian Asset and they are mad about this, calling it a fake inquiry when in fact the documents, proofs, witnesses, even the public statements made by the president show a horrid stand for the enemy and not his own camp…the wish to abandon NATO, the allies, the support given to the likes of Putin, Duterte, Kim and other despicable despots.

In a way, we could wish for J. Edgar to be in charge of the Bureau he has created today, to be able to take out the files he would have collected on this monster and show how he works for Russia – “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” – in more than those public statements that should have been enough for any sensible person to see the fool for what he is.