J. Edgar
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Imagine Entertainment
THERE’S NOTHING really wrong with J. Edgar, a film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the screenplay for Milk, another recent gay biopic). It’s atmospheric, it’s well acted, it covers an interesting sweep of American history, and it effectively dramatizes the relationship Hoover had with his lifelong companion Clyde Tolson—and, more important, the one he had with his mother. It’s just that one still spends a significant portion of this movie simply waiting for it to end.
The film opens with a truly shocking scene that sets the tone for Hoover’s entire career and provides the key to his character: a plot by anarchists to blow up the house of his boss, the U.S. attorney general, along with several other prominent Americans, in 1919—when Communists and anarchists like Emma Goldman hoped to overthrow the government. Hoover was obsessed with Bolshevism forever after. Years later, when Robert Kennedy asked him to turn the FBI’s attention to organized crime, he would not surrender this obsession. Like Senator Joseph McCarthy, Hoover believed that foreigners were trying to destroy America; unlike McCarthy, he did not equate Communism with homosexuals. In fact, it is now thought that Hoover, judging by his relationship with his right-hand man Clyde Tolson, was one himself.
Whether this was so is one of the subjects of this movie. Nowadays there is something irresistible about the idea of the crime-fighting G-man 
being a big queen. However, in an article called “Five Myths about J. Edgar Hoover” that The Washington Post ran when the movie opened, the rumor that “Hoover was a gay cross-dresser” is traced to the wife of a Hoover confidante who “had a grudge from a contested divorce.” Thus whatever Tolson and Hoover “did physically behind closed doors, if anything, they kept between them,” even if “their relationship, by all appearances, was stable, discreet and long-lasting.”
In other words, we just don’t know. According to Black’s script, it was a case of sexual desire forcibly repressed. In a dramatic scene, Hoover (played by Leonardo diCaprio) rebuffs Tolson’s attempt to make their relationship physical. Still, while kissing was forbidden, the movie makes very effective use of less damp forms of touch: hands held, hands on shoulders, hands on thighs. The relationship is nevertheless extremely matrimonial right to the end, when, like most marriages under the onslaught of old age, it becomes pathetic. Tolson, played by the exceedingly handsome and young Armie Hammer, ends up a sort of powdered ghoul, so made up he seems to have strayed from a science fiction movie, and the final picture of Hoover, dead on his bedroom floor, is a portrait of the horror of old age and death.
At the start, however, Tolson is the recognizably gay man, sensitive to fashion and décor. And there is one brief moment when the two men start dishing together like queens. But what they were like when the real couple showed up at the bar at the Mayflower Hotel, a legend in gay Washington, one never really finds out. People who come to this movie to see Hoover in a dress (though he does put one on) will be disappointed; things were more complex than that.
This attention to complexity is to the movie’s credit. J. Edgar is nothing if not judicious. The problem with it, however, as with all biopics, is that one never knows what’s based on fact and what’s purely speculative. If the factual portions were filmed in black-and-white and the speculative in color, that would help; but, of course, they’re not. The two most dramatic scenes—Tolson’s reaction when he learns that Hoover’s thinking of marrying, of all people, Dorothy Lamour, and Hoover’s reaction to the death of his mother—are very dramatic and feel emotionally true. Yet surely they were imagined, since the only source for both could have been Hoover and Tolson, who survive this movie with their privacy intact.
Much of the rest of J. Edgar contains so much history that there are times when one wonders, as one did with Milk: wouldn’t this have been better as a documentary? This slice of American history stars a man as twisted, in his way, as Richard the Third—but there is somehow no suspense in it as a dramatic narrative. It feels like we’re at a history lesson as we march through Hoover’s career from the 20’s to the 60’s—from the young man appalled by the attack on his attorney general to the fat old bureaucrat getting what appear to be injections of speed in his office. Meanwhile American history flashes by: anarchists, gangsters, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, the secret files on Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King—right up to Nixon, who dispatches his men to Hoover’s office after he dies to find those secret files that enabled him to deflect every president who tried to limit his powers.
The person who’s seen at the movie’s end patiently shredding these files is Hoover’s secretary—a woman who, having rejected young Herbert’s awkward marriage proposal by declaring that she is married to her work, provides the key, surely, to Hoover as well: Hoover was his job. His only intimate relationships with women seemed to have been with his mother and his secretary. The most embarrassing moments in the movie involve Hoover’s attempt to play the heterosexual male role. J. Edgar is the saga of a Mama’s Boy. The most chilling moment for a gay male viewer is surely the scene in which Hoover’s mother (Judy Dench), after telling him that she would rather her son be dead than homosexual, proceeds to teach him to dance so that he will be more successful with women. It’s creepier than Psycho.
Hoover seems to have been a man who was ambitious, tightly wound, dependent on his mother, in love with his work and celebrity, and obsessed with keeping America safe from the Bolshies. And that’s about it. The fact that Senator McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and J. Edgar Hoover all apparently had problems with heterosexuality makes them fodder for our era’s belief that when you repress your own sexual orientation, you inevitably turn to other forms of repression; but who knows?
If anything, one comes away from this movie with a portrait of a young man from a middle-class family in Washington who succeeded as a member of that species peculiar to D.C.: the civil servant. It was J. Edgar who made sure that FBI agents were well-educated, committed, and squeaky clean; that scientific methods like finger-printing (widely mocked in Hoover’s day) and laboratory analysis of crime scenes were adopted by the bureau. How much his sexual orientation had to do with that is a mystery. By the end of the movie, Hoover is a bureaucrat whom time, and history, have passed by—even if, as his secretary reassures him, the bureau that he built remains. Indeed, the FBI Building that bears his name even resembles him: an exercise in 70’s architecture known as Brutalism, which occupies, like a medieval fortress, an entire block in downtown Washington, a city in which you can still find gay men who tell stories of going to all-male parties at which, after much drinking, the only ones not expressing physical affection were Tolson and Hoover.
J. Edgar doesn’t really try to explain their bond. How could it? All biopics, whether romantic fantasies about Chopin or Cole Porter, or documentary-like treatments of Harvey Milk, are cartoons in a way: broadly brushed renditions that have to cover the main events in the subject’s life while providing intimate glimpses that “explain” the reason they turned out that way. Even now I’m not sure why this dark slog through the life of Hoover felt so much like a history lesson. It may be that we can no longer take the liberties that Hollywood once used to jazz up the life of Chopin or Lord Nelson. J. Edgar may be tedious because it is too even-handed a portrait of Hoover, an odd charge to level against a biopic—but there is in this movie no sense of Hoover as either a villain or a hero. Hoover was considered for many years a powerful holder of secrets with which he had the potential to persecute anyone who criticized him, which may have rendered him immune from any commentary on his relationship with Tolson, though this movie gives us scant indication of how their relationship was viewed.
It’s hard to say why this movie turned out the way it did. The real problem may be that Hoover was not, let’s face it, a lot of fun. One has to give J. Edgar credit for beautiful photography, excellent acting, and a script that does not take any cheap shots; but in its skillful reflection of the world in which Hoover worked and lived, the tone is rather depressing. Even so, the joke may be that to Hoover it was enjoyable: he succeeded in his career, kept his job to the end, and predeceased his boyfriend.
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited
