I guess he's been dead long enough, finally a biopic about the infamous J Edgar Hoover. The great defender of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against the unholy, bolshevik, subversive, immigrants and perverts gets a movie that isn't just a whitewash. I am in the middle on this one. Leonardo did as good a job as could be done with the muddled narrative and oppressive make-up. Too much time was spent on the Lindburgh kidnapping, although it did serve as a narrative device to balance early and later Hoover.
Some of Hoover's worst offenses, such as COINTELPRO (illegal activities against self-perceived subversive enemies) and his blackmail of politicians were glossed over to give more room to his relatively harmless but fake heroics that were used to establish his reputation as a Tough Guy. The movie also focuses a lot on the relationship of homophobic Hoover and his "special friend" and 2nd in command, Clyde Tolson (played by the Winklevoss twins). It's definitely worth seeing if you have any memory of J Edgar the G Man or if you have ever wondered about this strange man, but it's also no more that what you can expect in a 2 hr movie about such a complex and malignant actor on the American stage. My favorite line in the movie is widely quoted from Richard Nixon after Hoover's death.."That old co*ksu*ker's finally dead".
