Clint Eastwood Tries to Humanize an Ambitious, Dangerous Pipsqueak in J. Edgar

REVIEW: Clint Eastwood Tries to Humanize an Ambitious, Dangerous Pipsqueak in J. Edgar

As Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine once said, “There’s nothing like a Hoover when you’re dealing with dirt.”Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar could use more dirt: This is a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of a scummy little man, an earnest attempt to map the contours and contradictions of a complicated son-of-a-bitch. But it’s all too earnest, to the point of serving, unwittingly or otherwise, as an apologia. Even Eastwood’s attempt at a poignant Hoover death scene fails to hit the mark: I for one would want to stick the guy with a pin to make sure he was really dead.

If this is what “greatness,” in a movie or in a performance, has to mean, I’d prefer a more intimate puniness, particularly when it comes to portraying a character like J. Edgar Hoover.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. J. Edgar, which flips between two roughly defined eras, the 1930s and the 1960s through the mid-1970s, shows us how the ambitious and wily, if initially rather shy and awkward, John Edgar Hoover became one of the most feared men in America. Leonardo DiCaprio wears his usual old-man baby face for one half of the picture and a mask of moderately effective age makeup for the other. His performance is dutiful and respectful and meticulously managed, which is exactly what’s wrong with it. Even though DiCaprio was a child actor — a wonderful one — he never really had a youth on-screen. Directors like Martin Scorsese saw what was astonishing about him and immediately began grooming him for greatness in pictures like Gangs of New York and The Aviator. Now, he can never be casual — it’s a luxury he was never able to afford — and Eastwood has done him no favors by locking him into yet another hall-of-fame role. It’s a testament to DiCaprio’s precision and sensitivity that we feel as much for his J. Edgar as we do. But seeing DiCaprio encased in a mask of soft, saggy jowls — in these scenes, he uses his buttery-sonorous vocal tone and piercing blue-green eyes, effectively if a bit desperately, to do much of the work — is still dispiriting. If this is what “greatness,” in a movie or in a performance, has to mean, I’d prefer a more intimate puniness, particularly when it comes to portraying a character like J. Edgar Hoover.

J. Edgar was written by Dustin Lance Black, who also wrote the 2008 Milk, and it represents a noble attempt to dovetail Hoover’s professional “accomplishments” with his personal life. The picture hits all the significant markers: Hoover’s intense relationship with his domineering mother (played by an imperious Judi Dench), his early, pipsqueaky ambitions and his eventual rise to become the head of the F.B.I., his roles (both the imagined and the real ones) in bringing down Depression-era criminals like John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, and his frustrating, and frustrated, search for the kidnapper and killer of the Lindbergh baby, Bruno Hauptmann. Later, after more or less crowning himself King of United States Intel, he bullies the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt (crowing hypocritically over his discovery that she was having an affair with a woman), Martin Luther King (whom he viewed as an enemy of democracy, or the American Way, or something) and Robert F. Kennedy (played by Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice, a Boston-area native who finally gets to use the local accent that Massachusetts actors work so hard to shed).

But in between all that, Hoover had a tortured, complicated personal life, which J. Edgar takes great pains to show. Early on, in the 1930s, Hoover shows an interest in a typing-pool cutie, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), who, being a strong, independent woman — and perhaps sensing a bad risk in the personal-relationship department — refuses his initial marriage proposal and instead becomes his secretary, sticking with him until and beyond the end of his life. (Watts has a great, ’30s-style face, as already evidenced by King Kong; in her age makeup, she’s a dead ringer for the present-day Hanna Schygulla, which is maybe not such a bad thing.)

Even more significant is Hoover’s relationship, both professional and personal, with his longtime colleague Clyde Tolson. The movie outlines, quite believably, how Hoover’s attraction to Tolson first manifested itself as intense nervousness and a desire to dominate. Tolson is unfazed. One of the first things he does is take Hoover to be fitted for some custom-made suits — sort of like a Depression-era Rachel Zoe — and before long, the two are confidants, though they of course have to hide the personal nature of their relationship behind closed doors. Hammer does make a coolly winsome Tolson. (Note to Hammer: Bambi called — he wants his eyelashes back.) And in the movie’s most effective and most piercing scene, Hoover and Tolson beat the crap out of each other in a hotel room, tussling out of frustration and, it seems, the rawest and most visceral kind of love. (Hoover and Tolson also sport some pretty smashing bathrobes in this sequence, courtesy of Eastwood’s frequent costume designer Deborah Hopper.)

In general, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for a closeted gay man in the days before Stonewall — unless he’s J. Edgar Hoover. Eastwood, Black and DiCaprio are all dancing as fast as they can in their efforts to humanize Hoover. But all you see is the dancing, and while it’s nice that the picture is honest enough to show how creepy, duplicitous, manipulative and power-mad Hoover was, there are too many places where the only suitable soundtrack would be the tiniest violins in the world.

We’re supposed to feel something as we watch the still-youthful J. Edgar mourning the death of his mother. (Grief-stricken, he dons one of her old dresses as a piano tinkles poignantly in the background, a moment of psychoanalysis that’s about as insightful as the forensic psychiatrist’s diagnosis in Psycho.) But the terrible thing about life is that mothers die: Good people and scoundrels alike have to deal with that reality. Grieving over our dead parents, as well as being gay or straight or bi, are the things that make us definably human. So why does J. Edgar Hoover — a man who retooled basic civil liberties to his own liking, setting precedents that will never be undone — deserve any special pleading?

In the past few years, Eastwood has given us a terrific, brazenly liberal-minded movie about what it means to be an American today (Gran Torino) and a rousing, if somewhat oversimplified, picture about how Nelson Mandela helped heal a nation with football (Invictus). He also gave us a plodding, overserious period picture in Changeling. J. Edgar is more of the same, but because it attempts to shoulder such a large historical burden, it’s an even bigger failure. J. Edgar is a handsome-looking film in a Smithsonian Institution kind of way, featuring all the right desk lamps, the proper period-specific typewriters, the silk pocket squares folded just so. And cinematographer (and frequent Eastwood collaborator) Tom Stern gives the whole thing a satiny, pewter-toned glow. But for all its exterior grandness, J. Edgar is still just tinny and overreaching. This is an overgrown movie about a dwarf among men.

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia Offers a Glorious Peep into the Sugar Easter Egg of Doom

REVIEW: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia Offers a Glorious Peep into the Sugar Easter Egg of Doom

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is neither the provocation nor the yowl of anguish that his last picture,Antichrist, was. For those reasons, it’s less effective and also far less of a workout: Antichrist was the first von Trier movie I genuinely loved, after a decade’s worth of railing against the sufferdome atmosphere of pictures like Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, and even the mildly bearable Breaking the Waves. Antichrist stunned and upset me, but it also filled me with compassion toward the man who made it, a feeling I’d never imagined I could have. The gift of Antichrist — with its horrific depictions of emotional suffering, its wailing-wind subtext of “Nature is everywhere, inside you and outside, and it is not your friend” — was that von Trier had surprised me. That is a critic’s greatest pleasure — or at least it’s mine.

With Melancholia, von Trier hasn’t tried to top himself, thank God. Despite the somber nature of the title, the movie is something of a breather, a respite, a chance for von Trier to explore emotional anguish and intricacies in vibrant, often elegant visual ways, with no self-mutilation involved.Melancholia is gorgeous to look at, deeply moody and atmospheric, and it’s always in on its own grim little joke. At the press conference following the movie’s Cannes press screening — before the director put his foot in his mouth with those ill-advised Nazi comments — von Trier said this movie is a comedy. He’s right.

Melancholia is the story of the end of the world, a day that’s coming very soon according to numerous doomsayers. And yet for one of the movie’s two heroines, it turns out that end can’t come soon enough. The end of everything we know also means we no longer have to worry about any of it: It’s kind of like the maid’s day off, except it lasts an eternity. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is a new bride, married only a few hours when the movie opens, and the first chapter of the film (one of two) belongs to her. She and her husband (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan, who also appears in the film) are en route to their own wedding reception at a palatial golf resort owned by her brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland, a marvelous scowling sourpuss) — the place looks like Augusta National transplanted to Versailles. The massive, hours-long wedding celebration has been overseen by Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose efficiency seemingly goes unappreciated by everyone other than herself.

But it becomes clear early on that this magnificent celebration — presided over by the sisters’ feuding, long-separated parents, played with great fireball energy by John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling — won’t be enough to draw Justine through the emotional keyhole that connects her dark, interior world with the regular one outside. Her gown looks as if it were made of translucent meringue, all rosettes and furbelows; but when the camera tracks to her face, we see a dull blankness that signifies internal terror. The groom is an afterthought. In fact, Justine indulges in a brutal act of female seduction, if you could even call it that, with another wedding “guest” out on the golf course, beneath a floodlight. Her insides and her outsides are mixed up: She flagrantly exposes everything that should be kept private and guards with utmost secrecy the things she ought to be sharing.

Claire looks on with exasperation. But she has her own worries, as the movie’s second chapter reveals. Her husband, an astronomy enthusiast, has gotten her and the couple’s young son hepped up about an impending event, a planet (named Melancholia) that is quickly approaching the earth, though he assures them there will be no collision. Claire isn’t so sure, and when the planet does appear in the sky — it’s an orb that glows powder-blue by day and whitish by night, like the moon’s long-lost twin — she uses a home-made astronomer’s tool, devised by her son, to make sure it’s not coming any closer.

But she can’t ignore the signs of impending disaster, and neither, it seems, can the horses hunkered down in the resort’s stables. When Claire and Justine go out riding in the mornings, Justine’s horse, a normally docile creature, repeatedly stops at the same location, unwilling to budge even when Justine beats him. But as Claire becomes more anxious about the bitter end, Justine blossoms, almost literally: One night Claire catches her lying naked on a riverbank, lounging placidly in the glow of Melancholia — it coats her skin with a pearlescent sheen. She’s already accepted the worst; the apocalypse will just be the icing on the cake.

The actresses’ performances intertwine beautifully, like twin climbing vines vying for the attention of the sun.

Gainsbourg’s Claire and Dunst’s Justine are both individual, distinctly human figures, possessed of varying degrees of fear and bravery. Justine, so fragile in the movie’s first half, is an armor-clad warrior in the second — paradoxically, once she concedes defeat, victory is hers. Claire is self-assured in the first half and hesitant in the second: Because she knows how to function in the real world, she’s much less sure about the unreal one she may be stepping into. The actresses’ performances intertwine beautifully, like twin climbing vines vying for the attention of the sun.

Claire and Justine are also inhabitants of a landscape, and that’s where von Trier outdoes himself. With cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, he’s created a natural world of highly unnatural, manicured beauty. That’s particularly true of the movie’s opening sequence, a preview (set to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde prelude) of everything to come. By design, von Trier tells us the whole plot of the movie in the first 10 minutes, using a series of slow-moving pictures rendered in High Renaissance colors. The images include Justine facing the camera, and the world, as dead birds drop from the sky around her; a horse easing himself to the ground, either in pain or out of exhaustion; a nightmare vision of Gainsbourg’s Claire attempting to carry her child across the grassy golf course, her feet sinking deeper into the soil with each step; the bride Justine as John Millais’ floating, lifeless Ophelia.

These are somber, glorious images: They incite both dread and shivery anticipation — the effect is that of gazing deep into the sugar Easter Egg of doom. What, exactly, is von Trier trying to say here?Antichrist was a scream of pain; Melancholia is more like a heavy sigh, a gasp at the horrible wonder of it all. It isn’t nearly as somber as its title would lead you to believe, and it’s so beautiful to look at that it feels decadent, almost luxurious. It’s also, for all its weirdness, reasonably accessible, as if von Trier had decided — tentatively — that once in a while it might feel good to be part of the human race instead of just railing against it. If it’s true that misery loves company, maybe this is von Trier’s way of reaching out. Melancholia may be as close as he’ll ever come to giving us a bear hug.

Al Pacino Devours Otherwise Humorless Jack and Jill

REVIEW: Al Pacino Devours Otherwise Humorless Jack and Jill

Despite all of the grumpy and/or gleeful speculation that arose around the internet when it got its first glimpse of Adam Sandler donning a wig and falsies to play his own awkward twin sister, Jack and Jillis not actually the worst movie of all time. Given other recent efforts from Sandler’s Happy Madison production company, most notably Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, it’d be hard pressed to even compete for the title of worst of the year. The film, directed by longtime Sandler collaborator Dennis Dugan and written by Steve Koren, presents an at least theoretically standard mix of slapstick, celebrity cameos and not-quite-winking sentimentality. It’s sometimes funny, but more often it’s just very strange and threaded through with hostility — at one point, during a montage that involved Jill repeatedly accidentally injuring a myopic Mexican grandmother at a picnic, the colleagues on either side of me leaned in separately to whisper, “What is happening?”

It’s as if, after years of playing characters with temper issues, Sandler has finally let some of that repressed rage leak out toward the audience.

It’s as if, after years of playing characters with temper issues, Sandler has finally let some of that repressed rage leak out toward the audience. And it’s not just the can’t-believe-they-actually-made-it concept of Jack and Jill that gives that impression. This is a film in which the product placement is so blatant (hello, Royal Caribbean Cruises!) it’s like a meta-joke with no punchline, in which a climactic moment of familial resolution is delivered entirely in nonsensical “twin talk” that goes on and on in a way that doesn’t strive for either humor or sincere emotionality.

Maybe it’s fitting that a film whose star often seems moments away from turning to the camera and yelling “ARE YOU LAUGHING NOW?” revolves around themes of reconciling with one’s background and going through a crisis of artistic integrity. The former dilemma belongs mostly to Sandler’s Jack Sadelstein, an ad exec whose idyllic Los Angeles life — beautiful house, adorable daughter and even more adorable adopted son (Rohan Chand, a scene-stealer), a wife (Katie Holmes) who converted to Judaism for him and a successful career. The only blip is his twin sister Jill, a manly (natch) spinster from the Bronx who comes once a year for the holidays and disturbs Jack’s SoCal zen with her crassness, neediness and overall ickiness. All Jill wants is to spend time with her remaining family, now that their mom’s passed away, but she’s incredibly irritating, both demanding of Jack’s attention and hurt when she isn’t given the fair share she seems to feel is due her back.

As Jack, Sandler plays straight man to himself, seething quietly and delivering muttered insults as his drag double demands to be taken on game shows, unintentionally insults everyone at Thanksgiving and then runs off into the woods, tries to online date and continually extends her stay, first through Hanukkah and then New Year’s. As over-the-top as this hell-is-yourself-as-other-people storyline is, it’s overshadowed by the converging narrative of an established star going through a mental break and looking for salvation in the woman of his dreams — Al Pacino, playing an outlandish version of himself in the midst of a mental breakdown. Jack has to been asked to get Pacino for a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, a seemingly impossible task that becomes a little less so when the actor falls for Jill, seeing in her a reflection of his New York youth and his former, happier self.

It’s a dedicated performance that goes far beyond being simply preening masquerading as self-mockery — Pacino shows more focus and less hamminess than he has on screen in ages — and if it’s one that the movie can’t really support, well, it’s hard to imagine the movie that could convincingly contort itself around Pacino rapping about Dunkaccinos, wooing someone with a cheesecake shaped like his face and getting into a fight with a ceiling fan. A YouTube video of the man breaking character in a stage production of Richard III in order to castigate an audience member who didn’t silence his or her cell phone (shades of Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman?) is genuinely inspired, while other moments are more familiar I’m Still Here territory.

Pacino ends up devouring the movie, but in a way that’s welcome, since there’s not really enough to Jack and Jill’s rapprochement to fill a feature. We’re meant to accept that Jill’s lonely and always felt overshadowed by her more popular brother, but that doesn’t make moments in which she sulks off because she wasn’t given her own birthday cake at the siblings’ joint surprise celebration at all sympathetic. Beyond how difficult it is to make the mental leap to seeing Jill as a separate character and not just Sandler in unconvincing drag, it’s even tougher to buy into the film’s halfhearted messaging about the importance of family and roots when that connection is presented via someone who’s the equivalent of a tumor that for health reasons should be removed as soon as possible.

Filling out the rest of Jack and Jill are Eugenio Derbez as the Sadelstein’s gardener and a possible Pacino romantic rival for Jill’s affections, Nick Swardson as Jack’s socially inept assistant, Norm MacDonald as Jill’s Internet date (username “Funbucket”) and an giant parade of celebs playing themselves. (“Celeb” being used loosely there — the cameos range from Johnny Depp and ShaquilleO’Neal to Bruce Jenner and Vince Offer, the Sham-Wow guy.) Bracketing the feature are interviews with real sets of twins (and one group of triplets) who talk about the pluses and minus of being part of a set, a glimpse of the fiction Jack and Jill thrown in with them. It’s a device that recalls When Harry Met Sally, a film this one suffers when placed up again in so many ways you wish it hadn’t ever made the connection.

Colin Farrell Slow Burns Through Smart, StylishLondon Boulevard

REVIEW: Colin Farrell Slow Burns Through Smart, StylishLondon Boulevard

I’m sure there are more exciting things in life than watching Colin Farrell, dressed in a sleek, dark suit, weave through the streets of London behind the wheel of a saucy black convertible, the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” rumbling on the soundtrack. But as random weekend movie pleasures go, I’ll take it: Farrell is the star, and the unassuming center, of William Monahan’s nervy, noir-inflected thrillerLondon Boulevard.

London Boulevard — the directorial debut of screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed, Body of Lies) — has some rough edges: There are some characters we care about whose deaths are handled a little too cavalierly — Monahan might have given their demises more weight or at least a dash of grace. But the movie has a brisk, glamorous style. I’ve noted some people carelessly comparing it to Guy Ritchie’s films, because it’s set in London and features gangsters, I guess. (Lord knows Ritchie was the first guy to think of that.) But it reminds me more of Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, though ultimately it’s darker and more raggedy around the margins. Still, Monahan, like Black and unlike Ritchie, has some feeling for his characters. (Monahan adapted the screenplay from a novel by Ken Bruen.) Who they are and what they do is less important than what they feel. That makes a difference in a movie that offers a variety of shootings, stabbings and head crackings.

And having Colin Farrell as your star doesn’t hurt. Farrell plays Mitchell, a guy who’s just been sprung from jail for getting involved in what he calls “an altercation.” Mitchell is a scrapper — he’ll fight when he needs to, and it sometimes gets dirty. Mitchell is that archetypal hood who’s trying to go straight. I know, I know, you’ve seen that before. But it’s Farrell’s face that makes a difference. Maybe it’s the way he conveys nearly unbearable worry and woe with just a slant of those deep-charcoal Groucho eyebrows — this is a face with a conscience behind it. I realized that, in this picture at least, Farrell reminded me of an even sexier Bob Hoskins. (I say “even sexier” to allow for the fact that Hoskins is plenty sexy in his own way.)

Mitchell resists getting drawn back into the crime game, but a hapless hood buddy (played by Ben Chaplin), pulls him back in, placing him squarely in the sights of a big crime boss (Ray Winstone) who wants Mitchell for his own, perhaps in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Mitchell is trying out for — and just may accept — a job as a handyman and bodyguard for a rich, eccentric, reclusive movie star, Charlotte (Keira Knightley), who’s perpetually hounded by paparazzi. Charlotte huddles, wrapped in a droopy cardigan, in her Holland Park house — it’s filled with Francis Bacons, which gives you some idea of both her mental state and her taste in décor. But Knightley conveys the sense that Charlotte wants out of these prisons, both the exterior and interior ones. At one point she asks Mitchell tentatively if he’d like to go out to a restaurant — “like people,” she adds. As Charlotte, Knightley’s face is filled with hollows. She’s just a few steps away from becoming one of her screaming popes, but she has something those popes don’t: A whisper of the sense that life could be better.

You just know Charlotte and Mitchell are going to fall in love, and that’s all right.

You just know Charlotte and Mitchell are going to fall in love, and that’s all right. You also know that Winstone’s classy-gauche, unapologetically racist gangster (when he goes to a restaurant and wants to order wine, he dismisses the black waiter and asks instead to see “the Somali — the wine guy”) is going to throw a bloody wrench into the works, and that’s all right too. I don’t think it’s a liability that London Boulevard is somewhat predictable. Its pleasures lie in watching the characters reveal their true colors, including a wonderful David Thewlis, who plays the druggy caretaker of Charlotte’s house. And the terrific character actor Eddie Marsan shows up in a small, slimy role.

The violence in London Boulevard is deftly handled — in some cases, it could actually stand to be a little more exploitive. And a subplot involving Mitchell’s boozy but winsome sister (played by Anna Friel) and a doctor who’s compassionate toward criminals (Sanjeev Bhaskar) could have been more fully developed and more gracefully handled, particularly since these two actors are so charming together.

But London Boulevard, even though it’s set in the present day, has an aura of ’60s stylishness about it. It was shot, beautifully, by one of the great unsung — at least in comparison to near-household names like Roger Deakins and Janusz Kaminski — cinematographers, Chris Menges. (Menges’s credits include The Reader, The Mission and The Killing Fields; he won Oscars for the latter two.) Menges makes London look both timeless and modern. And in a clever, visually arresting touch, Mitchell keeps encountering giant posters of Charlotte’s face everywhere he goes: It haunts him both literally and figuratively. The credits tell us those images are the work of the great bad-boy fashion photographer David Bailey. No matter how you ultimately feel about London Boulevard, it’s worth noting that this is the work of a first-time director who surrounds himself with the right people. That’s not just an advertisement for his good taste — it’s a mark of humility, too. The confidence of London Boulevard never tips into cockiness. This is style with some intelligence behind it.

Immortals Wants to Be 300 So Bad It Hurts

REVIEW: Immortals Wants to Be 300 So Bad It Hurts

As cool-looking, dumb and deadly serious as you could desire, Immortals openly aims to be the heir to300, and succeeds in at least being a reasonable facsimile that hits many (too many) of the same testosterone-driven beats. The battles are just as imaginatively bloody, the abs painstakingly chiseled, the dialogue tin-eared, only this time around the stakes are not just the fate of the historic(esque) world, but of the divine one as well. There are gods in this film, beautiful, gold-cloaked ones who watch worriedly from atop Olympus as Greece is overrun by the armies of the wicked King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), a man who wants nothing less than to bring about the destruction of their divine order, though they’re forbidden to interfere in the world of man for…oh, who knows why? Also, it’s in 3-D — dark, dark 3-D I’d avoid if given the option