J. Edgar Review

Almost every scene here takes place in a brown room, and Tom Stern's near colorless photography turns fifty years of American secret history into one long underlit corridor. The structure is the bigger problem. Dustin Lance Black's script hangs on Hoover dictating his memoirs to a rotating cast of young agents, which lets the film skip between the Palmer raids, the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Kennedy years without building pressure inside any of them.

DiCaprio is committed and often very good early on, when Hoover is a stammering bureaucrat with a filing system and a crush, and Judi Dench is chilling in her few minutes as the mother who would rather have a dead son than a daffodil. The hotel room fight over Dorothy Lamour is the one place where the closeness between Hoover and Tolson registers as something felt, and it helps that the scene sits in the nineteen thirties, before the prosthetics take over.

Then the old age makeup arrives. Armie Hammer, buried under latex that seems to move independently of his face, is impossible to watch, and the most delicate material in the film is smothered. Tolson's stroke, his accusation that Hoover invented most of his own legend, and the deathbed admission should be where all of this lands. They play as a special effects failure instead.