J. Edgar

This brooding, shadow-drenched melodrama with strong political overtones examines the public and private lives of a strange, tortured man who had a phenomenal will to power. A man with the keenest instincts for manipulating the levers of government, he headed the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Though in theory he served eight presidents, in practice J. Edgar Hoover served only himself.

Starring an impressive Leonardo DiCaprio and crafted with Clint Eastwood’s usual impeccable professionalism, J. Edgar gets its power from the way the director’s traditional filmmaking style interacts with the revisionist thrust of Dustin Lance Black’s script.

This film’s J. Edgar is not the patriotic anti-Communist stalwart Hoover considered himself to be, but rather someone who only imagined he was the hero of the story, someone who went from outcast to oppressor by not hesitating to ride roughshod over and even blackmail whoever got in his way. Absolute power truly corrupted him absolutely. The overriding irony of this situation was that this man, as rigid and self-righteous as any of the Soviet commissars he feared and fought against, apparently had an unacknowledged private life that gives his story unexpected poignancy but would have made him a target of his own investigations had it been lived by someone else.

    – Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times