Praise for J. Edgar by Major Critics

Manohla Dargis, Glenn Kenny, Richard Roeper, David Denby all praise Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar.  Some seem to believe that this is a matter of Eastwood’s core fans supporting him always no matter what.  But I think it’s more a matter of getting the bigger picture – recognizing who Clint Eastwood is in terms of a being a film author, what he’s trying to do with J. Edgar, and all the ways he ventures into uncharted territory in this, the later part of his career.   I honestly think there are a handful of directors with the kind of stature and power Eastwood has who take such risks with their careers time and time again. How one cannot be impressed by this is beyond me.

Dargis:

Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerable Leonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.

Glenn Kenny:

Make no mistake, though; this movie doesn’t use Hoover’s fraught, unfulfilled personal life as grounds for some sort of “he ain’t no delinquent, he’s misunderstood” rationalization of his dissembling and his oily abuses of power. It merely presents the life as one of a man self-entombed practically from birth. Leonardo DiCaprio brings some of the teeth-gritting neuroticism he used in his portrayal of Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” to bear on this equally curious and querulous character, but does something entirely new in portraying Hoover’s oft-pathetic vulnerabilities. Judi Dench also brings some surprises to the table as Hoover’s mother, Annie, a pious and subtly grasping woman: Dench takes her steeliness out from under the table in a key scene that means to elicit gasps, and does. Armie Hammer is equally at home making Tolson at first an object of desire for Hoover, and then, the closest thing the man will ever have for a conscience. And Naomi Watts is brilliantly contained as Helen Gandy, the personal secretary to Hoover who is as dogged a keeper of secrets as Hoover himself.

Eastwood handles the sinuously shifting timelines with a confidence and ease that respects the viewer’s intelligence in a way that few Hollywood films do these days. You won’t see a line at the bottom of the screen telling you where you are every time a scene shifts location. By the same token though, too much of the time the dialogue is a little bit on the button with respect to historical facts, as in “You mean Mrs. Roosevelt?” and that sort of thing. Jeffrey Donovan is too broad as Bobby Kennedy, and Christopher Shyer is too broad as Richard Nixon, but it’s hard to imagine actors who wouldn’t be in those roles. And while DiCaprio’s old-man makeup has nice, and for all I know deliberate, resonances of Orson Welles’ old-age makeup in the legendary title role of “Citizen Kane,” there will be some who will complain that is looks like … old-age makeup. I think it’s probably reaching to try to rationalize this (side) effect as a deliberately Brechtian touch, so I won’t. I will just report that it bugged me for a little while, and then it did not. For all its rough edges, “J. Edgar” is finally a thought-provoking emotion picture of deep sadness, a far-ranging elegy disguised as a historical drama.

Richard Roeper:

One of the best films of 2011:

J. Edgar | Clint Eastwood | Leonardo DiCaprio | Richard Roeper | Roeper’s Movie Reviews | Movie Trailer | Review

New Yorker’s David Denby:
“J. Edgar”—a collaboration with the activist gay screenwriter of “Milk”—represents another remarkable turn in Clint Eastwood’s career. Remarkable, but not altogether surprising. Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar, working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry. As the filmmakers tell it, the roots of Hoover’s manias lie in his nature. The movie bears a thematic resemblance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), in which a repressed homosexual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the nineteen-thirties, longing for “normality,” joins the Italian Fascist Party and operates as an amoral bullyboy. “J. Edgar” is the story of how a similarly repressed personality might operate in a democracy. The answer is privately, by accumulating secrets and blackmailing anyone who is even remotely a threat to his standing; and publicly, by making himself and his outfit pop-culture icons and then bending the government to his whim. The frame for the movie is the Director, in old age, dictating the story of his career to a series of young men from the Bureau. Black and Eastwood use this plot device ironically: Hoover is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, and the way Eastwood stages the actual events suggests that Hoover is pumping up his own role and stretching the truth.

The dark-toned cinematography, by Tom Stern, is as redolent of the past as old leather and walnut. The images are heavily shadowed, with faces often seen half in darkness, a visual hint that these people do not know themselves very well. Hoover’s ethics and his style are traditionalist in tone but radical in application. He flourishes at a time when powerful men are perfectly groomed and dressed—and cloaked in secrecy. Fanatically dedicated to appearances, they are fooling themselves, perhaps, as much as others. In the movie’s portrait of pre-electronic America, Hoover pierces those appearances with wiretaps, bugs, and the lowly file card, an early database that, aided by his longtime secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), he wields to devastating effect. Nonetheless, Hoover is fixated on his own image and on that of the Bureau. Outraged that the public is enjoying the panache of Jimmy Cagney as a gangster, in such early-thirties pictures as “The Public Enemy,” Hoover lends his name and his support to Hollywood films, and, by the middle of the decade, Cagney is firing a gun on behalf of the government.

And yes, there are a whole pile of bad reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes.