THE crime investigation principles upon which J Edgar Hoover founded and developed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation have few if any equals in the world.
But as a human being, he was a gravely flawed, pathetic, lonely, unlovable, selfish, arrogant, pitiless, paranoid failure, driven by hatred for the USSR and communism, a perception of black Americans as inferior beings and the corny Jewish joke “Oedipus, Schmoedipus, what does it matter as long as he loves his mother?”
Clint Eastwood’s biographical film of Hoover is perforce a condensation of a life, career and private anguishes, structured around dictation of its main events to a ghost writer. In its bitsy to-and-fro dramatic structure, facial prosthetics worn by main characters and event references of which Australians may be only peripherally aware are often the only keys to what era it is.
That’s sometimes annoying but not destructive to the impact of a film that was never meant to send us out wearing feelgood smiles.
Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay offers several invitations to read between its lines and pray that people who can influence decisions that make a difference in an inherently conservative society with economic, political, military and cultural tentacles spanning the globe, learn its lessons.
Leonardo di Caprio gives a first-class portrayal of Hoover. Naomi Watts plays his career-long private secretary Helen Gandy shielding an unquestioning loyalty from any emotional enquiry into the morality of the man and his deeds. Armin Hammer is the second love of Hoover’s life, Clyde Tolson. Judy Dench makes short work of Hoover’s first love, his mom.At Dendy, Greater Union and Hoyts
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