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Rating:
I am puzzled. Or confused? Confused.
Was this guy, Edgar, good or bad? I mean, to me, he was a real jerk, one of the worst, but to good old Clint, instead? What message did he want to convey to his compatriots (because the film is aimed at them)?
Clint disappoints, absolutely, because he falls exactly into the same trap where all directors with certain tendencies fall: ambiguity. Like Argo. You watch it and say "damn, that's beautiful" and then "damn, those Iranians are jerks" and then "damn, the CIA is great" and you don't know why you're saying it, but you are. And that's even though good old Ben showed you that they did worse than Bertoldo.
The film shows all (?) the protagonist's misdeeds but frames them as part of a process, a broken cog in a functioning machine. That machine is the United States. Edgar is a jerk, agreed, but look at how he got everything he has! A repressed and insecure homosexual, submissive to his domineering mother, look where he ended up! This is the American dream! And there's nothing bad about it.
The jerk (for anyone with a certain scale of values, at least) is Edgar, not the society that created him and allowed him to do what he did (as logic would dictate?).
Apart from various doubts about morality and other nonsense, the film is enjoyable. Leonardo DiCaprio gives an excellent performance, despite being unwatchable with old-age makeup. He succeeds in capturing the idea of someone unhinged, a bit bipolar: on one hand, the classic type with a big car to compensate for the size of something else, on the other, the classic homophobic fascist who secretly dreams of taking it himself, which isn't easy to portray after American Beauty, because everyone looks there, and as an actor, you take it, yes, but in a figurative sense. Well done, Leo. If only you hadn't done Titanic, damn it. Naomi Watts is fairly insubstantial, not entirely her fault, but more due to the script, which doesn't give her much scope (but perhaps that's just as well).
It's shot in Clint's style, so you don't expect much, but you have a minimal quality guarantee. And you enjoy it quite a bit.
Appreciable? Appreciable. But please, let's not show it in schools.
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Other reviews
By Hellring
The figure of Edgar was played by Leonardo Di Caprio, who performs a colossal acting task, portraying Edgar across nearly 50 years.
Despite an underlining immobility that makes J. Edgar at times extremely heavy, nothing can be said about the final product.
