|
J. Edgar Hoover is such a huge figure in recent American history, he's almost too big for one movie to contain.
The scope of his influence on everything from politics to law enforcement is tough to get your arms around, especially considering how little we know about him.
But give director Clint Eastwood credit for trying and creating a provocative and fascinating, if occasionally uneven portrait.
Thirty-seven-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, who looks perpetually 22, is miscast here, but he gives a dynamic performance portraying Hoover from his early 20s all the way to his early 70s. The aging makeup isn't terrible, but he spends so much of the movie in it that it can be distracting.
The complexity of the character is that he loves his country as much as the corrupting power the comes with his office - and he craves the spotlight as much as the shadows. And at the end of the day, he goes home to his momma, played by Judy Dench.
Hoover helped develop modern-day crime-solving tools like fingerprinting, but he also had secret files on seemingly everyone in the public eye, from Eleanor Roosevelt, to MLK and The Kennedies. And he was willing to use them.
The heart and soul of the film comes from Armie Hammer, playing Clyde Tolson, who was Hoover's right hand man. But he was probably also Hoover's lover, and that love story gives the corrupt law man some semblance of humanity. Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black handles that facet with care and beautifully understated emotion, but his storytelling otherwise is often muddled, jumping around at times without much sense or aim.
"J.Edgar" is often engrossing, even hinting at some of the controversial claims like, Hoover may have been a cross dresser, but I'll take DiCaprio in a dress playing it serious over Adam Sandler doing the same for laughs.
In "Jack and Jill," he plays twins - one a selfish businessman, the other his horrendously annoying sister.
It's awful - even though the movie tries to distract us from that fact with tons of cameo appearances, from Johnny Depp to the Sham-Wow guy.
Sandler has been funny before - I still like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and his dramatic turns in Punch Drunk Love and Funny People. But Jack and Jill is the kind of movie his character in Funny People would be ashamed of having made.
Sandler co-wrote what passes for a screenplay, and somehow he managed to get Al Pacino to take a significant supporting role. Maybe there's a sex tape of Pacino out there Sandler threatened him with releasing.
I think Sandler may have finally hit rock bottom with "Jack and Jill," so aggressively unfunny and terrible it's insulting to us, and embarrassing for the people on screen.
But it's still less painful than watching that Tech vs. Oklahoma State game.
|
