Justice Served

In the 1990s, the science fiction show Sliders was much in vogue. Like Quantum Leap, its genre compatriot, it rounded off each episode with a teaser for the next one (at least, that’s how I remember it after more than a decade). A particular instance is lodged in my mind and not subject to the vagaries of memory. Having entered a new dimension, they accost a fellow to make inquiries of the different reality in which they now find themselves. The man reacts with horror at the approach, fearful of ‘President Hoover’. John Rhys Davies as the Professor exclaims with ill-concealed incredulity “Herbert Hoover is president of the United states?” The visibly harassed man corrects him in a beat “J. Edgar.”


This is the reputation of the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - a megalomaniac whose monstrous caprice could destroy a person’s standing at a moment’s notice and who sought to repress freedom at every turn. As such, it would not be totally surprising that he would find some nefarious way to prolong his life by several decades in order to perpetuate his tyranny. Clint Eastwood, fresh from the drubbing he took in trying to celebrate the invigorating triumph of South African Rainbow Nation joy, primarily through Nelson Mandela, in Invictus, on the latest step in his directorial path seeks to recultivate the man J. Edgar Hoover.

Oliver Stone tried similarly to rehabilitate Richard Nixon as a tragic hero in the manner of Macbeth. In Nixon, Hoover was portrayed as little better than a pederast, with a predilection for servant lads of darker skin, in Bob Hoskins’ cameo of him. Eastwood’s J. Edgar is not slow to enumerate the faults of this ultimate lawman, but shows him as all too human than as a mythic villain.

For Eastwood, it is Hoover who is the tragic hero, with Nixon bringing dark forces in his wake, exemplified by Leonardo di Caprio’s Hoover’s tirade against ‘moral decay’, sniping “evil flourishes” just as newsreels show newly elected President Nixon giving the victory sign from his motorcade. Hoover clambers over dead bodies as he makes his name – John Dillinger, the Lindbergh baby – but these are not of his own making (much as he strive to claim over Dillinger, resenting Agent Melvin Purvis’s centrality in that case and resulting celebrity). Appealing to the Republican instincts of Eastwood, Hoover was a patriot in the truest sense (deriding the ‘opportunist’ Jo McCarthy); however misguided he may have been in his later years, he always sought to do what he thought was right for his country.

Others have sneered at Hoover’s transvestite inclinations and homosexuality. Eastwood (whose elegiac and restrained music composition epitomises his subject’s buttoned-up demeanour) is the thoroughly modern director, making the film as much a love story between Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) as it is straight biography/hagiography. It reminds me of a man I spoke to over the telephone in my work capacity, who had called to place the death notice of his male partner in 2009. They had been together for 55 years, separated when this man with whom I was conversing had to be admitted to hospital for two weeks. When he came out, he was told his companion had passed away a few days before, but more than that, the man to whom he was devoted had died alone and it is this that caused him most distress. Tolson, who had greater health problems than Hoover following a stroke, also outlived his lover. The transvestite issue does veer into Norman Bates/Psycho territory with the mother-worship (though who wouldn’t be in awe of the formidable Judi Dench) but it is not overdone, with Hoover seeking strength in the absence of her.

Miss Gandy (Naomi Watts) could have been a beard to Hoover (of whom you might say it was ironic, given his distaste for facial hair), yet her devotion to her job as his secretary was close to the role of a wife, along with Tolson, moderating Hoover’s more manic designs. After we hear Nixon order his underlings, with suitably purple invective, to recover Hoover’s confidential files on anyone who was anyone in America, we see Miss Gandy shredding them to abide by Hoover’s wishes that these files should never fall into the wrong hands.

Though the ageing process looks impeccable, for some of the obsessive-compulsive behaviour of Hoover, di Caprio could reprise his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, while look to The King’s Speech to see an exemplar of a man overcoming a stutter. Indeed, Hoover is so analytical and socially obtuse, he is near autistic. One could intuit that this led to the control freakery. – the film certainly does. The envy of Bob Kennedy’s fireplace is nicely done. Further, he is an exceptional fit for Tolson, desirous of glory and adulation as his partner is retiring in nature.

As it in part depicts the early days of the FBI, it is a little bit of a shock to know how limited they were. Not only did they have no official firearms (Hoover distributing them to his men before a raid, saying there was nothing in the law about using guns for personal use), they could not even make arrests.

The period styling is top drawer and the familiar Eastwood motifs are there, such as the chiaroscuro (particularly highlighting the verticality in di Caprio’s face, to illustrate the difference in Hoover’s public and personal nature) and showing violence is messy, self-destructive and cowardly, not inspiring in the slightest. The cross-cutting across the eras serves the narrative well, especially in the denouement when Tolson tells Hoover how it is.

I never managed to see that Sliders episode that followed on from the entrée of the previous story but I doubt they did the justice to J. Edgar as Eastwood has done. Yes, he died in office like a pope or a king, but the FBI was his baby and protecting it and America was a passion of his and sometimes he overstepped the mark. Sympathy? Controversial but probably, overall, right.