J. Edgar (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts.
Long and unfocused biopic of the man who led the FBI for a hundred and eighty-three years.
J. Edgar is not a flattering portrayal of its subject, although perhaps it's unfair to suggest a flattering portrayal of Hoover is possible.
As its starting point, J. Edgar takes the position that pretty well all the rumors about Hoover's life - even the really ridiculous ones - are true. Sorry, Hoover, that's what happens when you live most of your life in secret. People get to fill in the blanks with any old thing they can come up with.
Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) in this film is an anguished gay man in a lifelong chaste relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).
DiCaprio's performance in the lead is as good as anyone could reasonably ask for, but not exceptional. His Hoover impression, particularly the "old man" version, is difficult to get past. He never sounds as much like J. Edgar Hoover as he does like Leonardo DiCaprio trying out a stereotypical 1930s voice.
Director Clint Eastwood has an odd way of dealing with the film's homosexual subject matter, at first handling it so delicately that he appears to be skirting the issue, only to make it such an overriding focus of the story later on that J. Edgar could very well be called a film about Hoover's sexuality.
The depictions of Hoover's unusual personal life eventually take a bizarre and hilarious turn with a straight-faced dramatic scene in which a 50-year-old Hoover, backed by the saddest part of the film's score, tries on his mother's clothes and tearfully tears them off again. The movie is practically over at this point, and this is the first and only reference made to the man's rumored preference for ladies' clothes.
And yet the surrounding portion of the film is clearly its best: the portion where all the vague insinuations made earlier about its title character begin to take shape, and where the cast starts to do something more than stroll around talking rapidly. If there is one unforgivable thing about J. Edgar, its that its first two acts are excruciatingly boring.
The film outgrows its dullness, but not its haphazard approach to storytelling. Throughout the movie it jumps between two or three different time periods using cuts indistinguishable from the cuts between any other scenes; the thickness of the silly putty stuck to everyone's faces is the only clue as to where we are in the story. (Armie Hammer's makeup is particularly unconvincing - as an old man, he looks sort of like a burn victim still wearing his bandages). The plot is mostly made up of anecdotes about Hoover's brushes with important historical figures, with little to connect them together.
This scattershot approach muddies any attempts to make a clear statement on who J. Edgar Hoover was. He's first a zealous commie hunter, then a repressed homosexual, then a petty diva, then a paranoid self-promoter, then an even more repressed homosexual, and then he's dead. What's missing is the bridges to connect these different sides of him into a coherent character arc. This isn't a portrait of a man, but a collage.
Rated R for sudden transvestism.
3 out of 5
Tower Heist (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Brett Ratner. Starring Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck.
Aggressively average comedy heist film.
A group of exiled employees and tenants (Ben Stiller, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Michael Peña) of a luxury New York apartment tower plot with a petty thief (Eddie Murphy) to rob a millionaire tower resident (Alan Alda) who defrauded them out of their life savings.
Tower Heist doesn't inspire loathing like most of Brett Ratner's other projects (Rush Hour, X-Men 3) have for me. It doesn't inspire any strong feelings at all. It's just an okay heist movie and an okay comedy.
The film is slow to get going, but never exactly dull. At no point does it reach an exciting pace, but it gets interesting enough. There aren't laughs, but chuckles. And so on.
Not a lot of use is made of the ensemble cast. Whereas heist movies usually revel in each character's specialized role, Tower Heist fills each spot with a warm body whose purpose in the robbery is unclear. Most of them have history with Stiller's character, but none of it gives any payoff. Eddie Murphy's character, after much buildup, seems to vanish from the story entirely around the climax.
Matthew Broderick, as a hopeless, timid, failed Wall Street investor, is the only real source of humor.
That's okay. The movie has enough going on that it doesn't need to be hysterically funny. It would have been nice, though.
A better movie would have been nice.
Rated PG-13 for stereotypes about Eddie Murphy.
3 out of 5
