Review: "J. Edgar" (2011)

When 81 year-old (and presently overactive) Clint Eastwood was announced to take on a biopic on the founder and long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one would not have predicted a film that not only examines Hoover's precarious, reckless and secretive methods, but his (mostly speculative) life as a closeted homosexual. 
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Although seeing as the script (a largely muddled and circular narrative, with nary a steady moment in sight) was written by "Milk" scribe Dustin Lance Black, an openly gay rights activist himself, the film, what with its repressed, tragic love story at its center between J. Edgar (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), seems to make a bit more sense.
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Beginning in the early 1920's and ending with Hoover's death in 1972, the film blurs by and touches upon the long-standing and controversial FBI director's career, from his days fighting gangsters in the Depression to the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. to his last days protecting secret files from the President. 
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Eastwood is in comfortable visual form here, using, as he once did with "Flags of Our Fathers", "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "Changeling," his prototypical desaturated colors and dramatic side-lighting with extreme contrast, in flickering quantities, the illusion of black-and-white.
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Yet I sense, no matter what his ideals are, that he's uncomfortable with at least a minority of the film's homosexual context. Not that he's homophobic or physically repelled by it, but just simply naive to it, for these scenes seem unfit for the sledgehammer subtleties of Clint. 
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Or perhaps what I'm sensing is a disconnect between performers, or perhaps performers and their older, liver-spotted self. Leonardo DiCaprio, no stranger to early 20th-century biopics himself, is able, even exceptional at times, as the titular J. Edgar Hoover, although his partner-in-crime-stopping, Clyde Tolson, portrayed by Armie Hammer, has so much bad make-up on in his final moments that we almost forget who he is.
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Throughout the film, there is the faint echo, the glimmering legibility of the portrait of a man in denial, in seclusion, in frustration to come to terms with who he is - the legend that will be printed in his untitled biography or the real man behind the facade of his elevated desk - yet the film's emotional center is nearly mute, muffled under the weight of prosthetics and fast-walking ineptitude. [C]