Movie Doctor: How to Fix ‘J. Edgar’

Will Leitch
·Editor

Every once in a while, we'll take an enjoyable-but-not-flawless movie and humbly suggest five little alterations. With our help, it'll be JUST right. (Warning: There will be SPOILERS.)

The Projector likes "J. Edgar" more than most critics, but it's clear it has some serious issues, issues that have encouraged the growing legions of Clint Eastwood detractors to pile on. We can't help but think that with just a little tweaking, the movie could have been darned near perfect. Here's how to fix "J. Edgar."

1. Drop the whole Lindbergh storyline. We get what the film's trying to do here, to show how Hoover truly did revolutionize law enforcement, and evidence gathering, and how he asserted his power and influence early on in his career. It still never builds up to any sort of payoff, and the details of the case are confusing and, all told, sort of irrelevant. There has to be a more streamlined way to explain a relatively minor point -- that Hoover was ahead of his time in some ways, at least in the early days of his time at the FBI -- than a limp, erratic version of "CSI: Fedora" distracting us every 20 minutes or so from the main narrative

2. The only famous person we need to see is Hoover himself. When you're making a movie about J. Edgar Hoover, obviously, he'll be brushing elbows with some famous Americans. But we don't need to see them, up close, particularly when they're being so badly impersonated. The terrible accent on Robert F. Kennedy and the bewildering caricature of Richard Nixon completely take us out of the film and further exacerbate the main problem of Clint Eastwood movies (that they're rushed and don't always pay attention to detail). Which brings us to ...

3. About that makeup ... We don't understand criticisms of Leonardo DiCaprio as an elderly J. Edgar: He looks convincingly old to us. But Naomi Watts looks like the Crypt Keeper and, worst, poor Armie Hammer, what did you do to that guy? You took one of the most handsome actors in Hollywood and pancaked so much old-age makeup on him that he looks like the guy in "RoboCop" after he falls in the toxic waste. This would have been the easiest thing to fix: David Fincher just made Brad Pitt age backwards, after all. We're pretty sure we saw some spackle fall off Hammer's head at some point.

4. More Armie Hammer, please. As committed as DiCaprio's performance is, we found ourselves constantly waiting for Hammer to come back on screen as Clyde Tolson, Hoover's loyal associate and (probable) lover. Their relationship is the heart of the film, and its only real connection to recognizable human behavior not bogged down in historical rigmarole. Dana Stevens of Slate called it a "soft shoe" performance, and that's exactly right: Hammer has just the right mix of charm, wisdom and vulnerability to knock the role out of the park. So why does he disappear for stretches? Why not just make your whole movie about the two of them. Actually, that's exactly what you should have done: If you really want to get to the mystery of Hoover the man, Tolson is the key. You're not gonna learn anything from his maniacal devotion to his work. What did make these two tick? What was their relationship like? If you don't have the answer to that question, you're not ready to make the movie.

5. Just take a breath, OK? And it always comes back to this. There are whole plotlines that don't need to be in the movie, clunky expository dialogue, some unintentional silliness and a mother character who is well-played by Judi Dench but should be more relevant to the movie as a whole than she is. The whole movie has the feel of a missed opportunity, a conventional biopic of a man who was the very definition of unconventional. J. Edgar Hoover was a crazy person, but "J. Edgar" treats him like a traditional Great Man With Flaws. That's what happens when you make a movie in which everyone is home from the set in time for supper. A little more digging, and this could have been something epic and grand and important, rather than a compelling but clumsy prestige picture. This one needs a year to figure out, before the cameras start rolling. In other words, we guess just want you to go back in time and do it over again. We look forward to "J. Edgar" in December 2012.

Thanks for a moment of your time, filmmakers. You're welcome.