You’ll find director Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J. Edgar Hoover to be an interesting take on Hoover’s twisted psyche, if you can stay awake.
Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent playing Hoover over the course of 50 years. So is Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network) as Hoover’s long time companion Clyde Tolson. Judi Dench nails the role of Hoover’s nightmare mom.
Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for Milk) see Hoover as a man tortured by the expectations of his scary mother, which keep him from physically completing his lifelong love affair with Tolson. That’s an interesting take.
Yet the movie drags. When your protagonist is arresting celebrity gangsters, solving the Crime of the Century, persecuting left-wingers and blackmailing Presidents, your story should pop and sizzle.
The movie also suffers from distractingly bad make-up on the older Clyde Tolson and the Richard Nixon characters.