1. Plot

2. Cast

3. Production

4. Reception
    Critical response  Box office 

5. Accolades

6. Historical accuracy

7. References

8. External links

• Clint Eastwood
• Brian Grazer
• Robert Lorenz

• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Naomi Watts
• Armie Hammer
• Josh Lucas
• Judi Dench

• Joel Cox
• Gary D. Roach

• Imagine Entertainment
• Malpaso Productions
• Wintergreen Productions

J. Edgar is a 2011 American biographical drama film directed, produced and scored by Clint Eastwood.^[4] Written by Dustin Lance Black, the film focuses on the career of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover from the Palmer Raids onward. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Josh Lucas, and Judi Dench. It marked Adam Driver's film debut.

J. Edgar opened the AFI Fest 2011 in Los Angeles on November 3, 2011, and had its limited release on November 9, 2011 followed by wide release on November 11. The film received mixed reviews from critics, although the performances were praised, and it grossed $84 million worldwide. It was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2011, while DiCaprio earned a nomination for a Golden Globe Award and both he and Hammer earned Screen Actors Guild Award nods.

Plot

In 1919, after anarchists attempt to assassinate Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, he puts his protegé J. Edgar Hoover in charge of a new division dedicated to purging radicals. Hoover quickly begins compiling a list of suspects. He meets Helen Gandy, a new secretary at the Justice Department, and takes her to the Library of Congress to show her the card catalog system he devised. He makes an awkward pass at her, then proposes to her. She refuses him, but agrees to become his personal secretary.

Hoover finds that the Department of Labor refuses to deport anyone without evidence of a crime. Learning that Anthony Caminetti, the Commissioner General of Immigration, dislikes the anarchist Emma Goldman, Hoover arranges to make her eligible for deportation and thereby creates a precedent of deportation for radical conspiracy. Following several such Justice Department raids of suspected radical groups, Palmer loses his job as Attorney General. His successor, Harlan F. Stone, appoints Hoover as director of the Justice Department's new Bureau of Investigation. Hoover meets lawyer Clyde Tolson, and hires him.

When the Lindbergh kidnapping captures national attention, President Herbert Hoover asks the Bureau to investigate. Hoover employs several novel techniques, including the monitoring of registration numbers on ransom bills and expert analysis of the kidnapper's handwriting. When the monitored bills begin showing up in New York City, the investigators find a filling station attendant who wrote down the license plate number of the man who gave him the bill. This leads to the arrest, and eventual conviction, of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh child.

After Hoover, Tolson, and Hoover's mother (with whom Hoover still lives) see the James Cagney film G Men, Hoover and Tolson go out to a club, where Hoover is seated with Anita Colby, Ginger Rogers, and Rogers' mother Lela. Rogers' mother asks Hoover to dance and he becomes agitated, saying that he and Tolson must leave, as they have a lot of work to do in the morning. When he gets home, he tells his mother that he dislikes dancing with girls. She tells him she would rather he be dead than a "daffodil". She insists on teaching him to dance, and they dance in her bedroom.

Hoover and Tolson go on a vacation to the horse races. That evening, Hoover tells Tolson that he cares deeply for him, and Tolson tells Hoover that he loves him. Hoover panics and claims that he wants to marry Dorothy Lamour. Tolson accuses Hoover of making a fool out of him and they end up fighting on the floor. Tolson suddenly kisses Hoover, who says that must never happen again; Tolson says that it won't, and tries to leave. Hoover apologizes and begs him to stay, but Tolson threatens to end their friendship if Hoover talks about another woman again. After Tolson leaves, Hoover says that he loves him, too.

Years later, Hoover feels his strength begin to decline, while Tolson suffers a stroke. Hoover tries to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into declining his Nobel Peace Prize, sending him a letter threatening to expose his extramarital affairs. King disregards this and accepts the prize.

Hoover tells Gandy to destroy his secret files after his death in order to prevent President Richard Nixon from possessing them. He visits Tolson, who urges him to retire. Hoover refuses, claiming that Nixon is going to destroy the bureau he has created. Tolson accuses Hoover of having exaggerated his involvement with key events of the Bureau. Moments later, Hoover tells Tolson that he needed Tolson more than he ever needed anyone else. He holds Tolson's hand, kisses his forehead, and leaves.

Hoover returns home from work, obviously weakened. Shortly after Hoover goes upstairs, his housekeeper calls Tolson, who goes to the house and finds Hoover dead next to his bed. A grief-stricken Tolson covers his friend's body. Nixon gives a memorial speech on television for Hoover, while several members of his staff enter Hoover's office and search through the cabinets and drawers in search of his rumored "confidential" files, but find nothing. In the last scene, Gandy destroys stacks of files.

Cast

• Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover
• Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson
• Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy
• Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh
• Judi Dench as Anna Marie Hoover, Hoover's mother
• Dermot Mulroney as Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr.
• Damon Herriman as Bruno Richard Hauptmann
• Jeffrey Donovan as Robert F. Kennedy
• Ed Westwick as Agent Smith, Hoover's biographer
• Zach Grenier as John Condon
• Ken Howard as U.S. Attorney General Harlan F. Stone
• Stephen Root as Arthur Koehler
• Denis O'Hare as Albert S. Osborn
• Adam Driver as Walter Lyle
• Geoff Pierson as A. Mitchell Palmer
• Lea Thompson as Lela Rogers
• Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon
• Miles Fisher as Agent Garrison
• Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman
• Michael O'Neill as US Senator Kenneth McKellar
• Christian Clemenson as Inspector Schell
• Geoff Stults as Raymond Caffrey
• Emily Alyn Lind as Shirley Temple
• Amanda Schull as Anita Colby

Gunner Wright and David A. Cooper have cameos as future presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower^[5] and Franklin D. Roosevelt, respectively, and are seen in the group of onlookers who arrive following the bombing at A. Mitchell Palmer's house.

Production

Reception

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 43% based on 231 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Leonardo DiCaprio gives a predictably powerhouse performance, but J. Edgar stumbles in all other departments: cheesy makeup, poor lighting, confusing narrative, and humdrum storytelling."^[7] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, gives the film a normalized score of 59 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".^[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.^[9]

Peter Debruge of Variety gave the film a mixed review: "Any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau's exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it – a dilemma J. Edgar never rises above."^[14] David Edelstein of New York Magazine reacted negatively to the film and said: "It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings." He praised DiCaprio's performance: "There's something appealingly straightforward about the way he physicalizes Hoover's inner struggle, the body always slightly out of sync with the mind that vigilantly monitors every move."^[15]

Box office

The film opened limited in 7 theaters on November 9, grossing $52,645,^[16] and released wide on November 11, grossing $11.2 million in its opening weekend,^[17] approximating the $12 million figure projected by the Los Angeles Times for the film's opening weekend in the United States and Canada.^[2] J. Edgar went on to gross over $84.9 million worldwide and over

$37.3 million at the domestic box office.^[18] Breakdowns of audience demographics for the movie showed that ticket buyers were nearly 95% over the age of 25 and slightly over 50% female.

Accolades

Historical accuracy

In an interview on All Things Considered, Yale University history professor Beverly Gage, who is writing a biography of Hoover, stated that the film accurately conveys that Hoover came to the FBI as a reformer seeking "to clean it up, to professionalize it," and to introduce scientific methods to its investigation, eventually including such practices as fingerprinting and bloodtyping. She praises DiCaprio for conveying the tempo of Hoover's speech. However, she notes that the film's central narrative device in which Hoover dictates his memoirs to FBI agents chosen as writers, is fictitious: "He didn't ever have the sort of formal situation that you see in the movie where he was dictating a memoir to a series of young agents, and that that is the official record of the FBI."^[26] Historian Aaron J. Stockham of the Waterford School, whose dissertation was on the relationship of the FBI and the US Congress during the Hoover years, wrote on the History News Network of George Mason University, "J. Edgar portrays Hoover as the man who successfully integrated scientific processes into law enforcement investigations.... There is no doubt, from the historical record, that Hoover was instrumental in creating the FBI's scientific reputation."^[27] Stockham notes that Hoover probably did not write the FBI–King suicide letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., as the film portrays: "While such a letter was written, Hoover almost certainly delegated it to others within the Bureau."^[27]

References

External links

• {{Official website|http://jedgarmovie.warnerbros.com}}
• {{IMDb title|1616195|J. Edgar}}
• {{allrovi movie|531244|J. Edgar}}
• {{mojo title|jedgar|J. Edgar}}
• {{rotten-tomatoes|j_edgar|J. Edgar}}
• {{metacritic film|j-edgar|J. Edgar}}

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