J. Edgar (M). Director: Clint Eastwood. Starring: Leonardo Di Caprio, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench. 137 minutes
First, let's talk about J. Edgar Hoover's jowls. The bulldog visage sported by the first director of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation was somewhat of a trademark. Which makes the casting of the baby-faced Leonardo Di Caprio to portray him in a film about his life seem like an odd choice.
Then again, Di Caprio is a perfectly fine actor, and movie makeup is a veritable artform — one which has been honoured with its own category at the Academy Awards for over 30 years, ever since Christopher Tucker was snubbed despite his superlative work on 1980's The Elephant Man.
Unfortunately the work done by director Eastwood's makeup department is far below the standard set by Tucker and successive exemplars. A case in point: Armie Hammer, who plays Hoover's offsider and would-be life partner Clyde Tolson, appears to be wearing some kind of rubber fright mask.
Worse, you can see the seam where Hoover's patented jowls have been pasted onto Di Caprio's pretty boy cheeks.
This may seem trivial, but it's actually a big problem for Eastwood. From Unforgiven to Gran Torino, his career as filmmaker has been marked by stories of redemption and flawed humanity. He clearly wants to humanise the oft-maligned Hoover.
So although the film focuses on Hoover's achievements as head of the burgeoning Bureau — his investigation into the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's child; successive 'wars' on demonic communists and gangsters — it also dwells on his relationship with his adoring but demanding mother (Dench), and his love for Tolson, which he represses due to fiercely felt societal expectations.
Unfortunately, with the actors' performances impeded by those laughable, immobile facial prosthetics, the task of humanising is nigh impossible.
But the problems with J. Edgar do not begin and end with artificial faces. Like another recent biopic, The Iron Lady, in which an Oscar-baiting Meryl Streep vigorously impersonates Margaret Thatcher, J. Edgar introduces its subject in his later years, as he reflects back on the events of his life.
This can be an effective approach, able to imbue a story with an elegiac, regretful tone, so that even when seen at their worst (Thatcher at her most spittingly imperious; Hoover as a repressed, self-aggrandising bully) the chance of redemption seems always within reach.
But it is also a manipulative and disingenuous tactic. Both films err on the