A textbook case of telling not showing: Why J. Edgar is a failed movie

One would think that there's so much material in the life of J. Edgar Hoover that you could make not just one great film about the man but many: the rise of the FBI and its fight against crime, the delusions and paranoia that destroyed the old man at the end of his career, the Lindbergh kidnapping case that made the FBI a world-famous organization, the conflicts with great leaders such as JFK and MLK, the repressed or secret homosexual life of the director, and so on. All of these elements are in Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar," but you know what - it's a totally boring movie. It just goes on and on (2-plus hours, or course) with endless exposition, everything explained and laid out in dialog, a textbook case of telling not showing. There are very, very few actual dramatic scenes - and it's not that I need a movie to be full of action, but characters need to be doing something other than talking, unless we're watching an Eric Rohmer movie, which this is not. Yes, we see that Hoover was a complicated guy - that he was prescient in bringing modern crime-solving techniques to the bureau but that he was delusional and power-hungry and personally tortured. But it seems as if we're watching a textbook documentary, there's no life to this movie at all The most interesting part, for me, is Hoover's relationship with his partner, Toleson - their scenes together are the movie's best - but there's nothing developed. The movie takes no real stance on Hoover, it's cool and distant, most of it shot in dark interiors, the only really strong image is DiCaprio's ever-present face: he does well at portraying Hoover throughout his long career, the makeup artist did a great job on this, but we always feel DiCaprio is playing a part, not living it.

Adding one note re "Midnight in Paris": I'd forgotten that Carla Bruni was in this movie, and when I saw later that she played the sculpture-garden guide, it explained something to me: I wondered why Wilson didn't end up with the guide character (whom he revisits in order for her to translate a French diary for him), and my guess is that in the original script he did end up with the guide but when Woody Allen was able to stunt-cast Bruni in the part he had to rewrite - would have been too weird for Wilson to walk off into the rain with the First Lady of France, so Allen added the periperhal character of the flea-market sales girl, who in the end walks into the rain with Wilson. BTW, the lovers walking into the rain is I think a slight homage and reworking of the end of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, when the lead character walks off alone into the rain at the end.