J. Edgar (1/10)

Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio are to be commended for wanting to make an old-fashioned biopic, educating people on an American legend. But did they have to make it so long, boring, and uninformative?

Purportedly the true story of the founder of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio), Hoover is portrayed as a sexually ambiguous, speechifying, cantankerous bore. In fact, DiCaprio makes so many monotonous speeches in this thing that I'm surprised he didn't grow a granuloma on his vocal cords.

Not only does Eastwood show no familiarity with pace, but the music he wrote for this makes the film even slower than it would be normally. The wordy, actionless script (Dustin Lance Black), doesn't help Clint much.

The film shows Hoover to be a loner with high moral expectations of others, but with few personal relationships, except one very close friend, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). While the film paints Tolson as clearly gay, it makes it fairly plain that the relationship between him and Hoover was not physical.

Making the film even harder to watch, instead of telling a straight biography of Hoover, Eastwood jumps back and forth among time periods without so much as an explanation. The only way we know that the time has changed is that Hoover looks older or younger. One minute he's looking for the Lindbergh kidnapper and then the very next scene he's talking with Bobby Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan). It's confusing and unnecessary.

It is also maddeningly uninformative. It's pretty well known that Hoover did not like the Kennedys and, in fact, hated Bobby Kennedy. There is not an iota of a clue as to why. In fact there's no why about anything anywhere. Hoover remains as much an enigma after seeing the film as he was before going in.

Naomi Watts plays Hoover's longtime secretary, Helen Gandy, and Judy Dench plays his mother, with whom J. Edgar was extraordinarily close. The film alludes to the vicious  rumor that Hoover was a cross-dresser, but doesn't spend any time on it and seems to reject it, but it is ambiguous. Both give good performances. In fact, all the performances are very good, especially DiCaprio's. It's not the acting that makes this such a disappointment.

Then there's the cinematography (Tom Stern). It's shot in washed-out colors. Is there a reason? Don't ask me.

Wait, there's more! The makeup (Tania McComas) is sometimes so bad it appears camp, especially when Tolson ages. He looks like a freak from a horror movie.

The first hour is agonizingly slow. In fact, except for about five minutes when Eastwood deals with Martin Luther King, Jr., this entire film is a drag (no pun intended).

Tony Medley is a film critic accredited by the Motion Picture Association of America. His reviews may be read in several newspapers as well as on Rottentomatoes.com, the Movie Review Query Engine, mrqe.com, and at www.tonymedley.com. In addition, he’s written numerous newspaper and magazine articles for publications like The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Magazine, The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and Good Housekeeping Magazine.

Tony Medley is a Silver Life Master in the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), an ACBL-certified Director, and the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Bridge. With over 100,000 copies in print, it is the best selling basic bridge book. He is also the author of UCLA Basketball: The Real Story, available on Kindle, and Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed, first published in 1978 and now in its third edition with over half a million copies in print, the first book ever written about the job interview for the interviewee.

Run time 137 minutes.

Not for children.