It’s never fully explained why J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio, Inception) was such a tightly wound screw in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. It is almost as if there is a piece of the puzzle missing. Many facets of his personal life are explored: his father had some sort of nervous breakdown, he had a co-dependent relationship with his mother, and he had to hide his sexuality from all but a few in his inner circle which consisted mainly of his lover Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, The Social Network) and his secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts, 2005’s King Kong). He was also a great egoist and a paranoiac for the ages. It’s fitting in a poetic way that his career would end at roughly the same time another of America’s great paranoiacs would rise to power: Tricky Dick Nixon.
The film weaves the personal and professional stories by having Hoover recite his tale to a biographer as a framing device. The tale weaves from present day (about 1972 in the film) and covers many of Hoover’s “greatest hits” most importantly two specific cases: the 1919 bombing at the home of a Bureau of Investigation chief and the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son. The first case was a personal one. The home in question was owned by Hoover’s mentor and confirmed his already simmering distrust of communists. The second was professional. The Lindbergh kidnapping allowed for the expansion of the fledgling FBI’s power and vindicated their, at the time, misunderstood forensic techniques. Yet through all of this, Hoover remains an enigma.
