Leonardo DiCaprio, caked underneath layers of makeup, looks the part of the controversial FBI director in the new film J. Edgar. But looks — and great acting — can deceive when the story isn’t quite right.
In telling J. Edgar Hoover’s story, director Clint Eastwood has lost his man. “He’s a mystery man,” Eastwood told the Washington Post at a screening of the film for Washington insiders last week. “I still don’t have all the answers on him.” Unfortunately, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, to whom Eastwood entrusted the script, believes he does have those answers: Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his longtime confidant and associate director of the FBI, were, as Black told a gay newspaper, “not straight.”
Hoover’s alleged homosexuality is news to the FBI agents who worked alongside him. And yet, Black, who grew up as a gay Mormon in Sacramento, considers it a fact. Black’s screenwriting credits read as you’d expect from someone who is an unabashed activist: He won an Oscar for Milk; there’s Pedro (2008) about a gay HIV activist from San Francisco who got on MTV’s Real World; and there’s The Journey of Jared Price (2000), a gay-teen romance. Black’s play, 8, tells the story of the Proposition 8 trial, a theme he returns to in his documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition, which argues that those bigoted Mormons, not the voters of California, did in gay marriage. Eastwood must have known what kind of screenwriter he was getting in Black.
In describing Milk to the UCLA Daily Bruin, Black admitted, “I wanted to inspire the younger generation to start becoming activists in a grassroots way. There’s a lot of stuff that still needs changing — not just gay rights.” Film becomes yet another tool of agitprop. J. Edgar is “the mirror to Milk — a chance to examine the other side of being gay and history and what happens if you have extraordinary political power, which is the opposite of Milk, but you decide to deny yourself love and keep it closeted,” Black told the gay newspaper Windy City Times. Hoover was a “very, very, very troubled man,” not a “pure sociopath,” as Black sees it. Hoover’s success at the FBI owes much to his repressed sexuality. His desire to create the nation’s finest law-enforcement bureau was driven not by his love of country, but because he was “denied love” by his “time” and his over-controlling mother, well played by Judi Dench.
“That love that dare not speak its name,” as Black puts it, is Hoover’s closeness for his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Tolson is portrayed as a dandy, whose well-tailored suits and mannerisms catch Hoover’s eye in a bar. Tolson accepts Hoover’s seemingly impromptu offer of the associate directorship of the FBI, on the condition that whatever happens, they must always dine together. The two, though they never move in together, are constant companions who vacation and frequent nightclubs together. “What really brings the film to life are the scenes that no one can prove happened,” Hammer told an interviewer. “Back then, to be publicly gay, you were done for.”
J. Edgar’s climax comes not from any action or controversial decision, but when Hoover tells Tolson he plans on getting married. Tolson grows irate and damages their shared hotel suite. He and Hoover wrestle, and Tolson kisses Hoover, only to have Hoover reject the advance. As Tolson storms out, Hoover is left pathetically telling Tolson not to leave him. He even says, “I love you.”
This, of course, is totally made up. It ignores Hoover’s own explanation as to why he never got married: His perfectionist streak would have driven a Mrs. Hoover crazy, and she could never measure up to his mother’s perfection. Black would no doubt have scoffed at this answer, citing Hoover’s refusal to date Hollywood women as evidence of his supposed homosexuality. Black never entertains that maybe he just didn’t want the drama of dating a celebrity. No matter: Black has his supposed smoking gun. Upon Hoover’s death some four decades later in 1972, Tolson receives the flag that was draped over his coffin, moves into Hoover’s home, and is even buried alongside him. This suggests closeness and loyalty to an heir apparent, not habitual homosexuality.
But in the film, possibilities are twisted into probabilities, which are, in turn, twisted into facts. (Is a Ken Burns documentary in the offing?) The accusation that Hoover cross-dressed came from a convicted perjurer with Mafia ties; rumors that Hoover was homosexual were a counter-information campaign begat by the Soviet Union, which failed to penetrate the FBI in all the years Hoover ran it and which felt threatened by his war against the Communists who had infiltrated American government.
The anti-government bombings and assassinations of the ’60s echoed the anarchist bombings of the ’20s. Neither Eastwood nor Black conveys the sense of urgency that these events must have engendered in the man charged with defending the nation. Hoover’s heavy-handed monologues belong more to something out of a Saturday-morning cartoon show or comic book than a realistic drama. There is only so much we can take of a megalomaniacal Hoover’s lamenting the moral decline of modern America. At a certain point, these lines just look cheesy and small. It has long been a Hollywood staple to make people who talk with any real conviction about these sensitive matters look at best odd. But perhaps it takes an odd man to be as keenly interested about matters that most would rather keep, so to speak, in the closet — such as America’s moral fiber. Hollywood liberals, let alone gay activists, avoid debate on them by a habitual ad hominem belittling and distortion of their cultural enemies, of whom Hoover — gay or not — was among the most recognizable.
Black does this by making Hoover run afoul of characters beloved by history. For example, Black never takes seriously Hoover’s fear of a Communist menace: Hoover is reprimanded for his obsession by none other than Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Of course the film leaves out that Kennedy’s brother was killed by . . . a Communist. Could Hoover have been right? Was he right to compare the anarchists of his day to the Black Panthers or other Communist sympathizers?
Also gone is any exculpatory evidence convicting those beloved characters in history. Gone is any explication of Robert Kennedy’s authorization of the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. over fears that King was a little too connected to known Communist-party functionaries, such as Stanley Levison, the New York lawyer and fundraiser for the American Communist party. Gone, too, are any situations whose depiction would have humanized Hoover, such as his opposition to Japanese internment during World War II. The film mentions his disdain for Joseph McCarthy, but never elaborates.
Alas, in its portrayal of Hoover, J. Edgar never really wrestles with the choices Hoover made in creating one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government, or with the possibility that he may well have been right about some of the figures we regard today as beloved — or that even if he was wrong, he erred out of a deep desire to serve the country. Hoover is seen sweating — swooning? — over Tolson, but not over the decisions he had to make.
Perhaps J. Edgar suffers from the same flaw that all biopics must suffer. The present, with its biases and fads, cannot adequately capture the past. J. Edgar’s disjointed narrative — flashing back and forth from the ’20s and ’30s to the ’60s — compounds the problem. It’s hard to get situated in the elaborate, beautiful world that cinematographer Tom Stern has furnished. It’s hard to care as we bounce around history.
But history was never the aim of J. Edgar. Moral judgment was. “Why make a biopic if it’s not somehow helping us now? There’s really no point. If it’s not informing how we can do things differently now and maybe not repeat our mistakes, than why do this piece about this person or this event?” Black sought to “anchor things in truth.” But in twisting the truth to suit an agenda, he prevented himself from writing a compelling portrait of J. Edgar Hoover and his times.
— Charles C. Johnson is author of the forthcoming book Coolidge: Then and Now (Encounter).