J. Edgar

First, let's get this out of the way. I am a mere (ha!) 36 years old and was not even born yet when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. The only reference I really had for him was Bob Hoskins's brief appearance in Oliver Stone's Nixon. I knew nothing about the man going into this movie, except that he essentially created the FBI as we now know it and that he was rumored to be a homosexual and occasional cross-dresser. Those latter details have so permeated our culture's portrait of him that I didn't know until a couple of months ago that these were unconfirmed rumors. Well, I guess they'd have to have been, given the time period.

Not that that matters, as both his (repressed) homosexuality and the cross-dressing are accepted as fact in this film, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. The film goes back and forth between the young Hoover, in the very first days of his leadership in the Bureau of Investigation, and the older Hoover, in the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon years. Both versions are played rather spectacularly by Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, the "old age" makeup is pretty bad and at times distracting, but the performance is so good - a true "movie star" performance - that most of the time you can forget about it. The older Hoover is dictating a memoir and telling stories (in more senses than one) about his early days in the FBI, notably his part in the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping. These stories of his professional life show him as a man desperate to be respected and admired, and desperate for his Bureau to be respected. I don't know how accurate this is, but the film indirectly credits Hoover with the implementation of a lot of the basic tools of investigation that we take for granted today (i.e., fingerprinting and keeping a crime scene free from contamination). There's a great scene, when he arrives at the Lindbergh estate, where he chastises the local police for carelessly traipsing over potential evidence and handling the ransom letter with bare hands. It's bizarre to think, in our current culture that is so saturated in police dramas and investigative storytelling, that it wasn't long ago when most people had no idea how important that kind of thing could be.

The movie doesn't raise Hoover up too high, though. It's unclear how much of the older Hoover's flashbacks are actually being dictated to the memoir writer, and that could very well be by design. Hoover often acted officially out of personal motives (jealousy and paranoia), and the film definitely doesn't let him off the hook for that, but you can tell that Hoover's version of events has been in his head so long and so firmly that whatever he's exaggerated or rationalized to himself has become the truth in his mind.

Hoover's political life story in the film is wrapped around his personal story, a story that I suspect no one alive can do more than guess at and extrapolate from facts and testimony. We see his social awkwardness, which the script attributes both to his devotion to his career and to a bitter struggle between societal expectations and his own desires. He attempts to woo and even propose marriage to typist Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) after knowing her only a few days, but seems dreadfully uncomfortable around other women. His mother (played by Judi Dench) loves him very much, and quite possibly knows the truth about his ambivalence to women, but makes it unmistakably clear that she does not approve of homosexuals (her conversation with Edgar about "Daffy" is devastating).

Which brings me to Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, perhaps better known as The Social Network's Winklevii), who Hoover made his Deputy at the Bureau (though he was nowhere near qualified) and who was possibly the love of his life. There were some giggles in the audience during their scenes together and the obvious tension between them, but this story is really the heart of the movie. What's heartbreaking is that these two men clearly love one another, but while Tolson doesn't have a problem subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) expressing his feelings for Edgar, Edgar never reciprocates any of those sentiments and it may be that he can't even admit his feelings to his own self. Their feelings for each other are never played for a laugh, and it's just so unbelievably sad to see how much they mean to each other and know that they can't even properly express it, even in private. The image of Hammer's Tolson reading a love letter, written by someone else but that Edgar had once partially read aloud, is one of the most moving things I've seen in a film this year - seeing him agonizing over things he heard in Edgar's voice and wishes had been addressed to him.

I have to address the cross-dressing thing, because the film does, and I was very impressed with how they did it. Again, it wasn't done for a laugh or even a hint of a joke. Of course, it wouldn't have been in the movie at all if there hadn't been the rumors, but it's not an "oh yeah, and he wore dresses" kind of thing. It's a legitimate expression of grief, and I totally bought it.

This film does have some issues. I thought the flashbacks were occasionally a little awkward, and as I said before the aging makeup was mostly awful. It wasn't so bad on Naomi Watts, but DiCaprio and Hammer looked like something from Madame Tussaud's. Again, though, the performances more than make up for it. I did feel like some of the historical cameos were more impressions than characters (e.g., Burn Notice's Jeffrey Donovan as Bobby Kennedy), but they weren't too distracting.

In the director's chair is the Man, the Myth, the Legend - Clint Eastwood. If you've seen any of his other films, you probably know what to expect here. It's not bombastic but quiet, steady, and sure. Eastwood also composed the score for the film, which is a very subtle, mostly (perhaps purely) piano score. A critic made the observation that Eastwood spent his career as an actor playing men who were above the law, like The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry, and that he's spent his career as a director telling stories about how these kinds of men are obsolete, which is part of what this movie is about. I can't help observing, though, that - for better or worse - the FBI is what it is today because of Hoover, and whatever else he might feel about his legacy, he'd probably be proud of that.

A Single Man

The first I heard of this film was in the summer, when its star, Colin Firth, won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. Awards pundits immediately placed him at the forefront of the Oscar discussion and this was called the role of his career so far. I have long been a fan of his, but admittedly most of my favorite roles of his were in the mold of what is probably still his most iconic performance, Fitzwilliam Darcy in the phenomenal 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

And, as far as it might be from Darcy (and Jack/Earnest Worthing, Jamie Bennett, and that other Darcy), I still think George Falconer, the eponymous single man of this film, is in somewhat the same mold. Stuffy on the surface and quick to disdain, but deeply passionate underneath, with an irresistibly sexy intelligence. Roles with that quality are what Colin Firth was made for, and he plays them exceedingly well. So when something like George Falconer came along, it must have been an enormous treat for Firth - a character with some familiarity, but with much more depth and layers and conflict than he'd ever been asked to attempt.

In A Single Man, directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, George Falconer is just trying to get through the day. A day he has decided is going to be his last. Eight months previously, his partner of sixteen years, Jim (played by the perennially beautiful Matthew Goode), was killed in a car crash. In one of several flashbacks, we see George get the call from one of Jim's cousins (Jim's parents will not acknowledge George). George accepts the news without a great deal of obvious emotion, but even through his shocked blank stare we can see how gutted he is at finding out that the memorial service is going to be "family only." And thus begins eight months of hell for George, who has lost the person who he loved most on earth but cannot openly grieve. This is set in the early 1960s, by the way, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We see George go through his daily details - waking up (which he says now physically hurts most mornings), getting immaculately dressed and polished, greeting his housekeeper, going to his job (he's a college professor). But something comes alive in him during one of his lectures, one of several faint glimmers of life throughout what he still intends to be his last day alive. We also see, through the film's flashbacks, George's life with Jim - how they met, a conversation on the beach, a boring night at home. He makes plans for later in the evening to visit an old friend, Charlotte (Julianne Moore), a woman he slept with a few times when they were young and who is his closest confidante. And he has a couple of encounters, one with a hustler and one with a student, that might have been romantic in other circumstances, but Jim is still too much in his heart.

This is just a downright gorgeous and powerful movie. There's a note of the obvious with one of the visual flairs that Ford uses - when George is feeling dead and blank inside, the film is washed out and colorless (without being straight B&W), and when he starts to feel more alive and connected with what's around him, there's a gradual infusion of color, almost as if the film is blushing. It's a little unnecessary, as if Ford doesn't quite trust his actor to express that feeling adequately, but it's hard to call it a flaw when it creates such a lovely contrast.

A Single Man is a gorgeous film with a brilliant performance at its center. Colin Firth has truly never been better. Just a wonderful heartbreak of a movie.

Suck it! Day 11 - Carmilla and Vampyres

There has always been an element of sexualization in vampire stories, and some of the stories featuring male vampires have had a homoerotic tinge, but lesbian vampires have been a genuine staple of the vampire canon, dating back further than you might think. Obviously, these tales were ripe for harvesting by the exploitation flicks of the 1960s and 70s. But they got their start in the 19th century and have found their way into more mainstream horror as well.

The source of this tradition is a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu called Carmilla, preceding Stoker's Dracula by fifteen years. The story is told from the POV of a young woman named Laura, whose strange houseguest, Carmilla, turns out to be a vampire. Carmilla preys exclusively (in the novel, at least) on female victims, and she develops a very close friendship with Laura, so close that the lesbian overtones are unmistakable.

Le Fanu's novella has found its way into several films, and today I submit a lesbian two-fer. First, the pretty faithful 1970 adaptation of the story by the Hammer house of horror, The Vampire Lovers. Then, a film that is not so much an adaptation of the novella, but a more general exploration of lesbian vampires, called Vampyres (or Daughters of Dracula) - Bonus Factoid: This one was one of the films screened at the very first Butt-Numb-A-Thon.


The Vampire Lovers

I don't like to call this exploitation, though it does contain a fair amount of sensuality (most notably in the form of bared bosoms), because it lacks the seedy feel of most exploitation fare. It's also rather beautifully shot. It is, however, definitely a standard bodice-ripping, bosom-heaving melodrama. It's quite a faithful, perhaps even expanded, rendition of the book, and the performances are uniformly strong for this type of film. I mean, when you've got Peter Cushing, you're halfway home, am I right?

Some variations on the theme - Carmilla/Marcilla/Mircalla, the vampire, can freely walk about during the day, though the sunlight is too strong for her eyes. She doesn't eat, but she does drink wine - red, of couse. There's the usual aversion to garlic and crosses, and she even reacts rather strongly to the singing of Christian hymns. Something that makes me laugh is a line of voice-over in the pre-credits sequence, wherein the narrator matter-of-factly informs us of the two ways to kill a vampire - in this case, stake through the heart or beheading - as if he were reciting from a textbook. And, like Dracula, Carmilla has an almost Svengali-esque hold over her victims.



Vampyres (or Daughters of Dracula)

The only relation this film has to the Carmilla story is that it also explores the lesbian vampire trope. Vampyres' vampires, Fran and Marian, live in a rundown manor house with an excellent wine cellar, and they lure passing travelers back to the house, seducing them, plying them with wine, drinking their blood, and ultimately killing them. They don't bite. Instead they cut their victims with a knife or shard of glass, and drink the blood from the wound. And when we see it, the blood-drinking is very violent and sensual.

There is a subplot with a vacationing couple who have parked their camper near the house and see the women lurking around (it isn't explained, but the women seem not to be able to stray far from the house). The woman and man are the classic believer and skeptic, respectively. She is suspicious and afraid of the women; he thinks she has an overactive imagination.

An interesting element of the story is that the vampires don't really have any supernatural characteristics. They don't have special powers, and they don't have any sort of restrictions, other than being bound to the house and not eating (though like Carmilla, they do drink wine). And there's no knowledge base for how they can be killed. In fact, unless I missed it, I don't think they are even dead in the end.

This movie might strike some as little more than soft-core porn. It is very frankly sexual, but it's fairly intellectual as well. It raises all kinds of questions that it leaves the viewers to try and work out on their own. Is Ted the man who shot Fran and Miriam in the very first scene, did that bind them to the house as ghosts, and is that the connection he has with Fran? What's the connection, if any, between them and the vacationing woman (who, I might add, has one of the most intense death scenes I've ever seen)?

I can only imagine what a hit this must have been at BNAT 1 at around 6am.

See you tomorrow, when we'll see what a man named Cronenberg can add to the mix.