Clint Eastwood

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.

So the things that are odd about the film, like its blend of Philip K. Dick-trapped-in-”The Matrix” paranoia and cut-rate Augustinian theology, feel clean and organic, if that makes any sense. (It’s based, very loosely, on Dick’s 1954 short story “The Adjustment Team.”) Nolfi’s dialogue is lean and often funny, while Damon and Blunt play appealing and clearly delineated characters drawn together by the kind of old-fashioned romantic passion you don’t often see in contemporary movies. You can feel the influence of classic American movies like “North by Northwest” and “The Graduate” here, and while I won’t argue that Nolfi matches those examples, his ambition is admirable. I also appreciated that “The Adjustment Bureau” doesn’t try to out-slick Christopher Nolan or the Wachowski brothers with high-style cinematography or mind-blowing CGI, even as it presents a universe where reality is not what you think, man.

Instead, Nolfi and cinematographer John Toll keep the movie calm and centered, sticking closely to the perspective of David Norris (Damon), a rising young New York politician who makes an unexpected discovery about the forces shaping his destiny. (I don’t mean such people as Jon Stewart, Mike Bloomberg and James Carville, who all appear as themselves.) I wasn’t a huge fan of Damon’s acting in his youthful “Good Will Hunting” phase, but as he’s edged toward middle age (he’s 40 now) he relies less on boyish appeal and has grown tremendously in presence and technique. This is another in his recent series of underplayed, awkward, emotionally strangled American-guy roles (after “The Informant!” and “Hereafter”) and might be the best. David is something of a quick-witted frat-boy type, who has risen from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood — Red Hook, for my fellow Kings County residents — and become the youngest congressman in history.

When he meets a gorgeous British party girl named Elise (Blunt) in a hotel men’s room as he’s preparing a concession speech, David is completely unprepared for what will follow. It’s a terrific ships-in-the-night scene, with almost a Noel Coward sparkle, and given the circumstances it feels convincing. David has gotten crushed in an election he expected to win (the New York Post published photos of him mooning college classmates at a reunion), and his emotions are forcibly leaking out of his buttoned-up persona. As for Elise, she’s a dancer and a choreographer and an impulsive hothead, exactly the kind of person who would hide from hotel security in the men’s room and then make out with a congressman she’s never met. The character could easily be a sexy-artist-chick caricature, but Blunt’s performance is so fiery, funny and intelligent she never feels that way.

But what David and Elise won’t find out for a while is that there’s a reason they meet in that bathroom, and meet again on a Manhattan bus a few months later — and also a reason they keep being pulled apart. (These are very minor plot spoilers, I promise — but here’s your chance to go elsewhere.) On his first day at a private-sector job after his electoral defeat, David winds up being abducted by a squad of fedora-wearing goons presided over by Richardson (“Mad Men’s” ever-wry John Slattery), who seem to have frozen time in order to recalibrate David’s boss’s brain. These guys can travel through a system of secret New York doorways that behave like mini-wormholes, they carry little electronic books (something like an iPad with actual pages) that seem to contain an ever-shifting cosmological template, and they work for somebody called The Chairman, whose design for the universe is called The Plan.

“Are you guys angels?” David asks Mitchell (the suave Anthony Mackie), who seems to have been deputized to watch over him. “We’ve been called that,” purrs Mitchell, before moving on to some semi-helpful obfuscation. (Apparently the Staten Island ferry is a good place to have conversations that God — sorry, the Chairman — can’t overhear. You might want to keep that in mind.) All this exposition happens early in the movie, and the real questions in “The Adjustment Bureau” aren’t about what’s happening but why the Plan apparently dictates that David and Elise must be kept apart, and whether there’s anything they can do about it. They can go on an exhilarating chase through those secret doorways, jumping from Wall Street to Yankee Stadium to the Statue of Liberty, that’s what. (This is among the best uses of New York locations in recent years.)

Now, those questions engender other questions, and if those sound like debating points drawn from an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” or a lecture by some Vatican II-style liberal theologian, you’re on the right track. Have David and Elise stumbled into a Miltonic War in Heaven, in which Mitchell — the only “adjuster” of color we ever see — is playing the role of Lucifer? If we live in a universe designed by some Grand Poobah who stands outside time, is our sense of agency and free will an illusion? If there is indeed a Plan, how could anything ever happen that would deviate from it? If God needs a bunch of FBI agents in 1950s clothes running around making us spill our coffee to keep things running, then his professed omnipotence is a total hoax, isn’t it? Or has he, in some grand New Age post-Thomist paradox, allowed us to become co-creators of the universe, along with him and the martini-smirky John Slattery?

OK, as you can see, either “The Adjustment Bureau” falls apart when you start to think about it, or you need to think about it a whole lot deeper and better than I just did. Nolfi makes no effort to conceal the Judeo-Christian roots of his premise (which is also true in the Dick short story), and if you object to infusions of pop religion into your science fiction — I see you out there, fists clenched and slowly turning purple — no doubt this movie will drive you nuts. But if you’re looking for an end-of-winter cinematic palate cleanser that delivers a sweep-you-off-your-feet love story along with a few gooey, chewy, slightly silly philosophical niblets, then the Plan demands that you see this movie.

While the indie-centric, New York-based Gothams don’t get widely noticed or discussed outside movie-biz circles, they provide a valuable early snapshot of which smaller films have been noticed by critics and industry types. Over the past few years, they’ve become a pretty good predictor of Oscar nominations. With the Academy sticking to 10 best-picture nominees this year, at least four of the Gothams’ five best-feature nominees are solid Oscar contenders, the fifth being Matt Reeves’ Euro-vampire remake “Let Me In,” which might be too small, too strange and too dark for Academy voters. (Anybody who reads the Gotham press release to the end will notice that I was on the nominating committee, so you’re welcome to read all this as sinister log-rolling if you like.)

In fact, this year’s Oscar race looks remarkably clear-cut, considering there are still 10 weeks left in 2010 and that the huge and socially irrelevant spectacle in the Kodak Theatre is more than four months away. Those are famous last words, of course, so let me allow some wiggle room and guess that I can accurately predict at least 8 of the eventual 10 best-picture nominees. Here are the morning-line favorites, in alphabetical order, followed by an assortment of outsiders and unknowns.

127 Hours Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) and ultra-hot hipster actor-writer-deep thinker James Franco in a stylish survival odyssey about a happy-go-lucky outdoors-type dude who has to cut his own fucking hand off! It’s almost an overdose of Oscar-readiness, and how audiences will respond to this gruesome and psychedelic yarn remains to be seen. But barring a commercial disaster, multiple nominations will ensue. (Opens Nov. 5.)

Black Swan Darren Aronofsky’s dazzling ballet thriller, with Natalie Portman as a young dancer haunted by the notoriously difficult starring role in “Swan Lake,” was the smash hit of last month’s Venice and Toronto festivals and ought to set fall audiences buzzing. Unless it crashes and burns at the box office, nominations for the film, Aronofsky and Portman are likely, with supporting nods for Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis also possible. (Opens in early December.)

Blue Valentine The Weinstein Co. and writer-director Derek Cianfrance are currently mulling how hard to fight the MPAA’s ridiculous NC-17 rating for this intense working-class marriage drama with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. (The rating could affect its Oscar chances, since most mainstream theater chains won’t show an NC-17 picture.) Paying viewers won’t see the movie until the end of the year, but a marketing campaign that began at Sundance and continued at Cannes has positioned “Blue Valentine” as a high-integrity, high-prestige film no matter how poorly it performs financially. (Opens in late December.)

Hereafter Clint Eastwood’s three-stranded, “Crash”-like exploration of mortality and the Great Beyond has gotten mixed reviews in its big-city opening, and may have trouble garnering audiences in an overcrowded season. Despite the weird subject matter, it’s a handsomer, cooler, altogether more Clint-like product than “Invictus,” and Eastwood movies should always be considered likely Oscar nominees until proved otherwise.

Inception Although knocked off its perch as critical fave-rave of the year (and presumptive Oscar favorite) by “The Social Network,” Christopher Nolan’s nested-dream thriller remains a likely best-picture nominee, if not all that likely a winner. It’s a major-studio film that was exceptionally well reviewed and made a ton of money (a domestic gross approaching $300 million), and it was directed by the guy who didn’t get nominated for “The Dark Knight” — the very phenomenon that led the Academy to double the number of best-picture nominees in the first place. Me, personally? I feel like I’ve forgotten about “Inception” and totally don’t care. But whenever you’re in doubt about any Oscar-related situation or phenomenon, go with the Mafia-like conspiracy theory, and there’s a debt to be paid here.

The Kids Are All Right Lisa Cholodenko’s lesbian-marriage comedy got universally glowing reviews and strong indie-level box office results ($20 million-plus), and tackled a hot-button social issue in disarming fashion. I’m not sure it’s going to win anything, but nominations for stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, co-star Mark Ruffalo (lending new weight to the comic concept of “straight man”), Cholodenko and the movie are all likely.

The King’s Speech This is the only movie on this list of probables I haven’t seen — no, let’s be honest. It’s the one I have actively avoided, because it’s a movie about King George VI and how he overcame his speech disability, and I had a hard time believing that it could possibly be anything except honorable Anglophile treacle. But at this point I’ve had enough trustworthy people tell me, “No, you don’t understand. Just go see it.” Reportedly full of Oscar-worthy performances all around, starting with Colin Firth’s starring role, but also including Guy Pearce (as the abdicating Edward VIII), Michael Gambon (as the dying George V), Helena Bonham Carter (as the young Princess Elizabeth) and Timothy Spall (as Winston Churchill). (Opens in late November.)

The Social Network Perhaps you’ve heard of this; I believe it’s about some young fellow who invents a computer, or some such thing. We’ve gone through a full iteration of pro-”Social Network” hype and anti-”Social Network” backlash and back again, and despite disappointing box-office returns (the film has yet to make back its reported $50 million budget, although it certainly will), the Mark Zuckerberg saga remains the leading Oscar contender, with nominations for the film, Aaron Sorkin’s script, David Fincher’s direction and Jesse Eisenberg’s starring role a foregone conclusion. Can this film survive the inflated comparisons to “Citizen Kane” and win a bunch of statuettes? A whole bunch of highly-paid P.R. consultants are mulling that question right now, and if I were that good at reading tea leaves, I guess I’d be one of them.

Toy Story 3 Yes, I think this will be the year a Pixar movie finally makes the best-picture list, but given the Academy’s particular blend of middlebrow obtuseness, there’s no telling. “Toy Story 3″ got wonderful reviews, made more money than any animated feature in history and entertained huge crowds all summer long. (I enjoyed it, but don’t see the near-masterpiece proclaimed by its most ardent defenders.) So what’s not to like? Oscar voters don’t do “cartoons,” it’s as simple as that. Even if TS3 gets nominated, director Lee Unkrich and the Pixar crew will have to make do with the best animated feature award, and go home halfway contented.

Winter’s Bone In another year, director Debra Granik’s devastating female-centric Ozark crime drama would be the little indie feature that gets one semi-surprising nomination (e.g., Melissa Leo for “Frozen River”), delighting everyone involved. But here again the expanded best-picture field comes into play. While 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is widely seen as a best-actress contender for her starring role as Granik’s teen heroine, the movie itself is a highly plausible nominee, with ultra-sinister co-star John Hawkes in the running for a supporting-actor nod.

UNKNOWNS, BOTH KNOWN AND OTHERWISE

Fair Game I don’t see Doug Liman’s worthy but plodding drama about the Valerie Plame affair as a strong best-picture nominee — partly because the events in question seem to have happened a lifetime ago — but good reviews or a surprising box-office turnout could change that. Naomi Watts (as Plame) and Sean Penn (as her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson) are both excellent, and surely will be considered for major acting awards. (Opens Nov. 5.)

Inside Job Charles Ferguson’s blow-the-roof-off exposé of the financial criminality that led to the 2008 banking collapse is clearly the frontrunner in Oscar’s documentary category. But it’s an angry, elegant, well-made movie that will appeal to Hollywood’s conscience, and I won’t be shocked if it sneaks could into the best-picture race as well. (Documentaries are rarely nominated, but there’s no rule against it.)

Made in Dagenham This red-hot British film starring Sally Hawkins and Bob Hoskins is coming up fast on the outside, with multiple nominations possible. It tackles not one but two important social issues — labor unrest and sexual discrimination — and does so with swingin’ period costumes and a working-class Anglo accent. Director Nigel Cole and writer Billy Ivory dramatize the legendary 1968 strike at a Ford plant outside London, where female workers organized and walked off the job. I haven’t seen “Made in Dagenham” yet, but it’s gotten a rousing response from festival audiences, and could attract female viewers in droves. (Opens in mid-November.)

The Town I didn’t much care for Ben Affleck’s exercise in Bah-ston he-man self-love, and “The Town’s” underwhelming results at the box office may have removed it from best-picture contention. Jeremy Renner’s hothead supporting character nearly stole the movie out from under Affleck and may have earned Renner a (completely deserved) nomination.

True Grit Any Coen brothers movie carries the potential of being a serious and dark-hearted Oscar contender (“No Country for Old Men,” “A Serious Man”) or of being a minor, jokey-dark farce (“Burn After Reading,” “The Ladykillers”). Which direction will they go with this adaptation of Charles Portis’ western novel (which also produced the 1969 John Wayne hit)? A dynamite cast headed by Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Jeff Bridges (in the Wayne role as Marshal Cogburn) suggests seriousness, while the level of secrecy surrounding the film — which hasn’t played festivals or screened for the press — suggests nothing in particular, except that the poker-faced brothers love to keep us guessing. (Opens in late December.)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps In general, nah. Oliver Stone’s long-awaited sequel failed to connect with either critics or audiences, and is a distant second to Ferguson’s “Inside Job” when it comes to illustrating the financial collapse. But given recent news about Michael Douglas’ cancer diagnosis, expect a supporting-actor Oscar nomination (at least) for his Gordon Gekko swan song.

I’m totally fine with cutting Eastwood a break based on his undeniable status as a national treasure and an iconic figure in Hollywood history. As certain friends are happy to remind me, I’ve definitely overpraised some of his mediocre outings. But as Clint has grown older and backed away from acting in his own films (he’s appeared in only two of his last eight directorial projects), the movies themselves have lost personality and vigor. “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino” are pictures that have many fans and many haters, but both possess an intensity and specificity of vision you just don’t see in handsome, dull, big-budget vehicles like “Changeling” or “Invictus.”

I admire late-career Eastwood in theory — he appears to be modeling himself on the versatile Hollywood craftsmen of his youth, like Howard Hawks or William Wyler — a lot more than I enjoy it in practice. That formula also applies to his new “Hereafter,” a movie that opens with a sensational bang and then proceeds to pursue the Big Questions about life and death in lovely, lugubrious and increasingly off-putting fashion, until all its drama has been frittered away in a dreamy, drifty haze.

Working from a screenplay by Peter Morgan (who also wrote “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon”), Eastwood spins out three leisurely “Crash”-style narratives, until they inevitably and rather unconvincingly collide. I have two tips for Morgan, who until now has specialized in crisp, witty scripts pulled from recent history. 1) Go back to that stuff, and keep the maudlin supernatural musings in the drawer. 2) When your story begins with a tsunami (literally), you can’t stage its climax at a book fair.

I’m totally serious about the tsunami-to-book fair arc, and that might seem comical if anything about “Hereafter” were even remotely funny. French TV newscaster Marie (the lovely Belgian actress Cécile de France) nearly drowns in the devastating South Asian tsunami of 2004 — it’s a stunning CGI sequence, on a scale unlike anything Eastwood has done before — and undergoes one of those out-of-body experiences that resets her entire attitude about life and death. Halfway around the world in San Francisco, a depressive psychic named George (the stocky, stoical Matt Damon) tries to flee from his ability to talk to the dead, which has become more a curse than a blessing. In a third, even gloomier strand, a cherubic London kid named Marcus (played alternately by George and Frankie McLaren) tries to cope with the death of his identical twin brother, not to mention the fact that his mom is a hopeless junkie.

“Hereafter” is something like an M. Night Shyamalan movie in extreme slow motion — all three of these people have brushed up against the Grim Reaper without actually dying, and the experience has left them cut off from ordinary life. Marie spaces out on the air and loses her job; when she gets a contract to write a veil-ripping biography of François Mitterrand, she delivers a book about life-after-death research instead. (Yes, that’s an utterly ludicrous turn of events, but let’s move on.) George strikes up a romance with a shy Midwestern chick (Bryce Dallas Howard) in his Italian cooking class, but when he performs a “reading” for her it doesn’t go all that well. Marcus barely speaks to his new foster parents, and spends all his pocket money on one psychic charlatan after another.

Much of “Hereafter” proceeds pretty genially, at least in the sense that the shots look great (the cinematographer is Tom Stern, Eastwood’s longtime collaborator) and the cast avoids oversized ham-bone emotions. And despite what you may read elsewhere I detect no particular religious drive behind this movie. George’s murky, milky visions of the afterlife are studiously nonsectarian, even agnostic. I have no problem, by the way, with a work of fiction that posits the existence of life after death or the Christian God or Satan or Vishnu or whatever you want; it’s a movie, and whether or not I find its worldview plausible is pretty much irrelevant.

But the dramatist has an obligation to make that worldview seem compelling, and to my taste the characters in “Hereafter” melt away into a doleful gray mist, equal parts boredom and sadness, long before fate brings them together amid the high drama of a London book fair. (We get a scene that features Derek Jacobi reading an excerpt from Dickens, for no reason at all beyond cozy fireside Englishness.) Clearly Eastwood is trying to strike a melancholy, unhurried tone, and some viewers are evidently swept away. Speaking personally, I only hope that if death is not the end, what lies beyond is more fun than “Hereafter.”

“Hereafter” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wide national release to begin Oct. 22.