MOVIE REVIEW: 'J. Edgar,' a rare Eastwood stumble

Sorry, Leo...Brando's jowels were better.

I don’t know what a bad Clint Eastwood movie looks like.

The man is an anomaly, the rare instance of movie star transitioning into filmmaking and becoming a better director than he ever was an actor. He makes films his way, rarely using terms like “action” and “cut,” keeping his sets relaxed, and his methods have resulted in Oscars, seemingly endless critical acclaim and a reputation as one of the finest directors of our time.

With J. Edgar, Eastwood turns to the enigmatic life of one of the most powerful men in American history, and the results are sadly and perplexingly underwhelming. Despite all the might of Eastwood’s direction and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance, J. Edgar ends up feeling cold and cobbled together.

Much of the film is structured as a frame story by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the brilliant Milk). We meet J. Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) near the end of his life, in his imposing office at the U. S. Department of Justice. He brings in a young agent and begins dictating the story of how the FBI became strong, how he rose to be its leader, and how he revolutionized Federal crime-fighting in America.

The film then begins to zip back and forth between Hoover’s early years in the 1920s and his later years as he clashes with the likes of the Roosevelts, The Kennedys and Richard Nixon. Along the way we meet his associate director, partner and rumored lover Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his hypnotic mother (Judi Dench) and his long-serving secretary (Naomi Watts), the only people he keeps close in a world he considers wrought with enemies, spies and “radicals” bent on dismantling America from within.

The film chronicles many of the FBI’s earliest struggles, investigations into organized crime and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, its rise to power and public glorification in films like The G-Men and finally Hoover’s descent into self-insulation and paranoia as the world begins to change in the midst of the civil rights movement.

J. Edgar lacks much of the emotional drive of most of Eastwood’s other films, but that might be the point. Hoover was a man who never married, who rarely expressed affection, who kicked people out of the FBI for things like facial hair and drinking. He was a distant man, but even as Eastwood and Black attempt to take inside his mind and heart, they seem to rarely really peel back any of the layers. Not until the final 20 or so minutes does J. Edgar hit any kind of emotional core, and by then it’s too late. The film is slick and structured with obvious purpose, but the objective is missed.

Much of whatever heart this film does have is placed in DiCaprio’s hands. He performs capably as Hoover, but it’s far from his best war. Perhaps the encumbering and obvious-looking prosthetics used for the later Hoover years have something to do with that, but it’s frankly hard to tell. Hammer is also equal to the task, but Watts is painfully underused, confined to any outer office for much of the film while DiCaprio declaims and lectures his way through the often word-heavy, impact-light tale.

Part of why the impact is so tough to feel is that J. Edgar never seems to move in one particular direction. It’s going everywhere. Black focuses much of the early years story on the Lindbergh kidnapping and how it influenced the development of Hoover’s bureau, but it’s hard to find a cohesive point amid stories of film premieres, congressional hearings and other crimes. Likewise the later years focus in on Tolson’s illness and how it affects Hoover, the power of the Kennedys and how Hoover contends with them, and the changing of the guard as Nixon is sworn into the White House. All of these could be titanic events that pivot the film into new territory, but they serve as mere benchmarks of time, touchstones that allow the viewer to connect with film’s chronology, but not with the man at its center.

I still don’t know what a bad Clint Eastwood movie looks like, because J. Edgar is not a bad film. It is likely one of the best mediocre films ever made, and the explanation could be that Eastwood simply overreached. The enigma of Hoover isn’t solved by this film, nor is any clear sense of what he really stood for deep down portrayed. This is an aggressively timeline-driven biopic that has no coherent timeline, but also a love story that has no clear romance and a coming of age tale that has no clear line of development. It tries to be too much and ends being very little more than a well-polished docudrama. In the end, you walk out of J. Edgar feeling intrigued, as intrigued as you were when you walked in, but feeling like you missed the payoff.

BOOK REVIEW: '11/22/63' by Stephen King

What if you could alter one pivotal event from the past? Would it change everything that came after? Would you be able to alter the course of human history by preventing the death of a single, very important, person? In one of his most ambitious and challenging novels, Stephen King asks the question, gives the answer, and does so much more.

Jake Epping is just a high school teacher in Maine when his friend Al, the owner of the local diner, changes his life by offering him a chance to travel back to 1958. Al’s been selling hefty hamburgers for $1.19 for years, and everyone’s always wondered how the burgers could be sold so cheap (unless they were made of cat). It turns out Al’s been buying his beef from the 1950s, and at 1950s prices.

In back of Al’s diner there’s a portal to the past that only opens on the exact same spot on a single day in 1958. Every time you go through the portal, you walk into 1958. Once you’re there, time passes normally, but once you leave, everything resets. Al’s spent years researching the portal, figuring out its time travel rules and the implications of what he can achieve with it.

Al decided long ago that the ultimate positive change he could affect would be to go through the portal, wait five years, travel to Dallas in the fall of 1963 and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He reasons that if he did this, everything would be different. Vietnam might never have happened, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. might also still be alive, the whole trajectory of United States history would shift. But Al has terminal cancer, so someone else has to do it for him. That’s where Jake comes in.

After experiencing life beyond the portal for himself, Jake takes the assignment and spends the next five years in a bygone era. He gets a new job, he moves to Texas, he falls in love, but all the while his eye is on a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, and the dark deed he’s planning.

The bulk of King’s story – which adds up to more than 800 pages – isn’t about Oswald or Kennedy at all. It’s about one man’s very curious relationship with time. Throughout Jake’s life in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, time seems to be getting in the way of everything he’s working toward. It’s as if the universe is standing in the way of his quest. His new and old lives are blending together in his head, events are making it more and difficult for him to focus on the task at hand, and his relationship with a woman who lived her early life a full 40 years before he did is changing the way he feels about everything.

King brings these phenomena to life with an intoxicating array of historical, cultural and emotional details. It would be easy to make this book a simple thriller filled with the rush of stopping an assassination and the daunting task of overcoming history, but what King cares about most – and what he makes us care about most – is the life Jake lives before that fateful day ever arrives. In true King fashion it all links together in the end, but in the years before that day in Dallas we are left to follow a man through a new life in a new time. That King chose to tell his story this way is proof of his guts. That we care so much about it is proof of his gifts.

Though horror is his bread and butter, 11/22/63 reveals King to be an elegant, self-assured and often surprising practitioner of the science fiction tradition. Time travel stories are all too often clunky with technical mumbo jumbo and scientific quagmires, but with his simple invention of a portal to another age in the back of a Maine diner, King has created something both astoundingly simple and endlessly intriguing. Jake carries the story, but that portal is its backbone, and it remains forever sturdy.

With 11/22/63, Stephen King has once again affirmed his place at the pinnacle of American storytellers, and he does it with a story that’s as much about America as it is about the intrigues of time travel. This is a towering, masterful book told by a towering American master, and it is not to be missed.

11/22/63 is in bookstores everywhere Nov. 8.

Advance reading copy courtesy of Scribner.