One of Director Eastwood's "Invisible Movies"

As I post this in December 2020, Clint Eastwood is on the verge of making history as the most successful above-the-title movie star of all time. He will be above the title as the star of a movie called "Cry Macho"...at age 90. A few actors worked past 90 -- Eli Wallach, Ernest Borgnine -- but not an over-the-title star in a lead performance.

With a career that began in the fifties; a hit TV show in the 60s(Rawhide) and movie stardom arriving around 1966 with the Leone Westerns..Clint Eastwood is a long distance runner as a star.

But Eastwood -- perhaps wisely -- has spent most of the past 20 years more often directing movies than starring in them. He's always been fit, but he looks and sounds pretty old, the reasons for his original stardom have gone with his youth and middle age.

Still the problem is this: it seems that too often as a director, Eastwood turns in perfunctory, incomplete, rather boring work -- that nobody sees.

Like "J. Edgar." Here is Eastwood directing a very big young star (Leo DiCaprio) in a movie about a very major subject(the Godfather of the FBI, who served for decades), and the movie got no traction, no real following, few(any?) awards.

J Edgar appeared within a pack of these oddball, lowkey unseen Eastwood pictures, usually with some sort of star attached: The Changeline(Angelina Jolie), Invictus (Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman), Hereafter(Damon again.) Even when Eastwood landed a very big star(Tom Hanks) in a very famous and powerful story("Sully," about the airline pilot who safely landed a damaged jet in the Hudson River)...THAT one seemed rather brief and perfunctory, too.

Anyway, so here is "J. Edgar" giving us Leo "flashing through time" from young to middle-aged to old in a story that never seems to lock in on the major political and historical moments of J. Edgars career, but rather shifts to his repressed personal life (celibate gay?) his too-close relationship with his Mother, and his growing paranoia.

Purposely shot and developed in a desaturated gray , with Eastwood's usual (and dubious) penchant for dark lighting, "J. Edgar" seems like a muted, sketchy, once-over-lightly treatment of its famous subject(despite running for over two hours) and ends up giving Leo DiCaprio one of his least important, least appropriate roles(its a little better now, but back then, Leo always looked like a kid in his father's suit). That the somewhat but not entirely Republican Eastwood has used his legendary status to get predictably progressive actors from Sean Penn to Matt Damon to Leo to work for him remains an interesting "truce" in Hollywood politics.

I watched this movie for the first time since its release, just the other night, and realized why I hadn't felt like seeking it out the first time: because it was invisible, came and went, had no impact at all.

Now I know why.