Michael Gillespie gives a measured response to both Clint Eastwood's latest film and the critical reception it has received.
Anyone who saw Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (and few did, which is a shame because it’s superior genre fare, even if it did take this viewer three viewings to appreciate its qualities. Might explain its box office failure come to think about it!) will remember the unnerving scene in which J. Edgar Hoover, ferociously embodied by the under valued Billy Crudup, orders Melvin Purvis to “take off the white gloves” in his pursuit of John Dillinger. It’s a tiny moment, but a simple change of angle and Crudup’s lethal delivery cut to the heart of one of American history’s most feared, occasionally divisive, and most controversial figures. Mann did much with one exchange; Clint Eastwood however, had two and a half hours to explore this extraordinary, infuriating man. Critics and audiences have been unconvinced, the same critics and audiences who have heaped praise upon revisionist, borderline hagiography like The Iron Lady. For my money, J. Edgar’s detractors are wrong.
Rummaging through his garbage for juicy information, writer Dustin Lance Black has crafted a story far less hopeful, accessible, or indeed straightforward, than his Oscar winning Milk (unlike Public Enemies, the film’s impact lessens considerably on repeat viewings). Where that film ran the gamut of heroic biopic cliché (an almost Christian parable of struggle, realisation, revolution, sacrifice and a message immortal), J. Edgar is far closer to Kirby Dick’s excellent documentary Outrage (one of the best films of the last few years, shamefully denied a UK cinema release). Many have dismissed the new film as monotonous, lethargic and of bringing nothing new to bear. I disagree. This is, if nothing else, a brilliant psychological character study, an interrogation and expose worthy of Hoover himself. If one argument against it is that it rushes through American history without truly exploring it, I would argue that it is less interested in addressing Hoover’s involvement in such events (although they are certainly there, and the ones chosen paint him at his most devious, immoral and hateful, such as his attempts to destroy Martin Luther King), than how these shifting plates of time reflected not just on him, but on American manhood.
Yes, the film drags up the usual Freudian analysis so beloved of American cinema (see, he had an Oedipus complex!), but there are subtleties at foot here that any follower of Eastwood’s career (and if you haven’t been following his career, why not?!) should be relishing. The self-reflexive, self-critical themes of Unforgiven and Gran Torino are present once again: Hoover’s disdain for US culture’s lionisation of the gangster as personified by James Cagney is remedied when he successfully makes “every kid in America want to be a G Man”, once again personified by Cagney. This might not seem terribly interesting, but in their choice of footage and their attention to the iconography of the old hoofer (a hero of Eastwood’s youth), they draw attention to America’s ideals of masculinity: the poor, refrigeration seeking audience of The Public Enemy now cheer the violence and hegemony not of criminals but of authority. For the male and female public, and for Hoover and his homophobic mother, this is just fine and Yankee Doodle Dandy (the title, of course, of the film Cagney made to keep the anti-Communist witch hunters, of whom Hoover was one of the most prominent, at bay…).
This is a film as concerned with American definitions of strength and machismo as Unforgiven was with violence and myth-making (that’s in J. Edgar as well, but it’s far more pronounced). It needs to be: Hoover’s fearsome reputation and the admiration of the right would of course take a bruising when allegations of homosexuality and cross-dressing came to bear. These allegations, as is the case with Alexander the Great, Edward II and William of Orange have never been conclusively proven. While they seem more than likely, no one can be absolutely certain, which is of course both challenging and enticing for dramatists. Tony Kushner of course gave us one of the best depictions of a closeted conservative in Angels In America’s Roy Cohn. While Cohn was unambiguously the villain of that piece, however, J. Edgar’s Hoover is the central protagonist, and as Kushner has pointed, for all Cohn’s evil, his death from AIDS related illness sparked a homophobic response not just from the right but from the “left”, which meant the gay community took Cohn to heart in spite of themselves. The same could be said of Hoover, if only we were more certain of his private proclivities. But Black and Eastwood’s achievement is not in arguing why an immensely powerful gay man would choose to stay in the closet (as Kushner does so terrifyingly well), but in slowly peeling back the layers (ironic given the notorious make up jobs: I thought the performances were strong enough to transcend them) of uncertainty and doubt of both characters and viewers, depicting a chaste man with an obvious and mutual devotion to another, a lack of interest in women, and a racinating desire to conform to the contradictory values of the world’s most contradictory nation.
The film doesn’t ask us to love Hoover, nor does it seek to rehabilitate him, as the Daily Telegraph might hope. Black is an openly gay liberal, Eastwood a sometime Republican and traditionalist idol whose politics have softened with age. Yes, it might be difficult to gauge if they agree that Hoover’s paranoid obsession with the communist threat was as damaging as our current demonisation of Islam, but this balancing act gives the film the conflicted force that has powered the best of Oliver Stone’s work. This is a knowingly contradictory, psychologically gripping account of a fierce but fascinating, innovative but intolerable individual undeserving of either hagiography or damnation. It might not take off the white gloves, but it certainly gets them over the knuckles.
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