Will the Real J. Edgar Please Stand Up?

Surely no 20th-century government figure wielded more power — or abused it more — than J. Edgar Hoover, founder and czar of the modern FBI. Such abuse is the stuff of drama. Yet Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is ponderous and plodding, with almost no dramatic impact despite a remarkable performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, who renders Hoover’s obsessiveness in flat, uninflected tones. Part of the problem is that Hoover, who collected information, often prurient, on public figures and blackmailed presidents to protect his own position, carefully lived his own life away from both public and private eyes. He nurtured his own myth while alive but left little personal documentation after death. Eastwood and his screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, whose screenplay for “Milk” won an Oscar, have tried to find the real Hoover behind the bluster, zealotry, bigotry and rumors of homosexuality. Yet the device meant to bring Hoover alive in his own words — he dictates his memoirs of famous cases and technical advances at the bureau to young agents — keeps him at a remove from reality. In the end, the memoirs provide just more chapters in the Hoover myth. Eastwood and Black zeroed in on the three important people in Hoover’s life: his mother, Anna Marie (a scary Judi Dench), his unmarried secretary Helen Gandy (an underutilized Naomi Watts) and his longtime associate director and constant companion Clyde Tolson (a handsome, charming, everything-Hoover-isn’t Armie Hammer). Anna Marie serves as the cause, in the creators’ minds, of Hoover’s profound sexual repression; Gandy provides the means for keeping, and quickly destroying after his death, the files of bedroom secrets that provided his hold on presidents. Only in the conjectured love story between Hoover and Tolson does the film come to life. (And Hammer makes us believe that Tolson was truly in love with Hoover.) Their scenes together take on an energy and vitality that exist nowhere else in the movie. Tom Stern’s otherwise desaturated, dark cinematography gives way to color, light, even sunshine when filming them. In certainly the most dramatic moments in the film, the two fight in a California hotel room after Hoover hints he may want to marry Dorothy Lamour and ends in a mouth-to-mouth kiss that stuns with its violent intensity. Eastwood’s concept is not helped by horrible old-age makeup. While DiCaprio’s just passes muster, poor Hammer wears a rubber mask that wouldn’t be out of place in a Halloween parade. He trembles and shakes, especially after a stroke, but we just watch the mask, not the man. Even the musical score, mostly piano played by Eastwood interrupted inscrutably by Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” is a downer. Perhaps the real problem with “J. Edgar” is that Eastwood and Black never commit to a consistentpoint of view. Was Hoover the monster who hated communists, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys? Or was he the hero who nabbed gangsters and brought finger printing and scientific methods to criminal investigation? Was he gay or straight? And, crucially, why does he matter anymore? Perhaps an Oliver Stone could have given us a reason. “J. Edgar” is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington and is supposed to come to The Moviehouse in Millerton soon.The film runs 136 minutes and is rated R for strong language.