Directed by Clint Eastwood
(R)
**
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Clint Eastwood’s ambitious biopic “provokes a host of assorted reactions,” said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. Among the strongest: a “simultaneous fascination and revulsion” with its subject, longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The admirably restrained screenplay, from writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk), hopscotches through Hoover’s 48-year tenure as he builds the agency, solves crimes, and amasses files on other people’s private lives while possibly stifling his own homosexuality. “Too bad” J. Edgar is so “turgid, so rich in bad lines and worse readings,” said David Edelstein in New York. The marriage of Eastwood’s plain style and his apparent belief that our government’s most intrusive practices are “rooted in a closeted gay man’s terror of being exposed” results in a film that’s almost a “biopic parody.” Leonardo DiCaprio gives the lead role his all, demonstrating “a remarkable ability to play the character” at every point across five decades, said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the actor’s “innate kindliness” becomes a problem too: Watching a reasonably likable Hoover feels “at odds with reality.”
