‘J. Edgar’ attempts to crack a tough case

For more than half a century, speculation regarding J. Edgar Hoover’s private life has focused on whether this bulldog of all-American virtue’s private life was fraught with secrecy, wrapped in layers of emotional and sexual denial.

Director Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” featuring a valiant performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, is a demure, rather touching inquiry into this possibility.

Molded by the presence, and then the absence, of a smothering mother (Judi Dench), Hoover ran the FBI and amassed confidential, politically explosive files on a universe of dissidents and enemies from 1935 until his death in 1972.

Did this power broker’s longtime working friendship with assistant Clyde Tolson constitute the one great love of his life, sexually intimate or no?

Constructed as an elaborate interweave of flashbacks, starting with the Red Scare “Palmer raids” of 1919 and 1920, the movie poses many questions. But rarely does this central question relating to Hoover, Tolson and what was between them fade entirely.

In recent interviews for the film, Eastwood has done his best to dismiss the inferences, saying among other things that the movie’s not about “two gay guys.”

All the same, the film’s screenplay – from Oscar-winning “Milk” scribe Lance Dustin Black – is very much interested in Hoover’s intimate relationship with Tolson, an Arrow Collar ad come to life in the hands of Armie Hammer.

It is very much concerned with how Hoover’s various facets coexisted in the same psyche: Hoover the closeted homosexual, Hoover the rustler of radicals and pinkos, Hoover the one-time paramour of Dorothy Lamour (the film glances briefly on this), Hoover the martinet and blackmailer.

“J. Edgar” suggests, convincingly, that Hoover was in love and felt he couldn’t do anything about it except spend as many meals and vacations and days and weeks and years with Tolson as he could manage.

Tolson, the script infers, was more willing to speak the love that dared not speak its name. We see, briefly, a hand-clasp in the back of a limousine. And in one startling and shrewdly staged hotel-room encounter, Tolson – fed up with Hoover’s inability to come clean about his desires – turns on his superior, which leads to a fight, which leads to a single, angry kiss.

Cinematographer Tom Stern’s hot, flat, chalky-white lighting pours into every interior, while Eastwood’s self-penned musical score (a key theme borrowing the first three notes of Duke Ellington’s “Solitude”) stresses the tender side of its subject, at any cost.

Is the boyish DiCaprio an ideal choice for Hoover? No. The old-person makeup (Naomi Watts, second-billed, does what she can as Hoover’s devoted secretary and secret-hoarder) is asked to cover a lot of decades. Yet his skill set remains formidable, as does his sense of adventure.

At times, DiCaprio’s macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando’s self-hating homosexual in “Reflections of a Golden Eye.” Eastwood can say what he likes in interviews. His film, at its slyest, says something else.