By WARREN DAY

The keeper of the nation’s secrets, had dark secrets of his own.

Two weeks ago I wrote a review about why straight critics were giving better notice to the gay movie “Weekend” than the gay critics were. Now I’m faced with a new film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover that could be the exact reverse. What seems contradictory and confusing about the life of a deeply closeted man to straights may make far better sense to gay men and lesbians.

Hoover was not only one of the most powerful and influential American figures in the 20th century (see separate box), but also one of the most enigmatic, an ever-churning stew of great achievements and great wrongs. Someone about whom you could write a biography that mentions only positive things, and then turn around and write an entirely different book of the same length about his shortcomings and transgressions.

Few individuals present so daunting a task in turning their comprehensive life into a comprehensible film. With “J. Edgar,” the result is 2011’s most ambitious and adventuresome movie–one that’s directed and produced by the indelible Clint Eastwood. It’s a life and a film filled with improbabilities.

The devise the writer uses to cover this complex and capacious life is to have the elderly Hoover dictate his memoirs to a series of FBI agents (all of them seemingly picked by him for their looks as well as their typing skills), and we then see in flashbacks the events that shaped him, and even more so, the many events he shaped for others. As it is in the nature of memory, his reminiscences jump back and forth, switching from one decade to another as his mind wrestles with what his life was like and how he desperately wants others to think his life was like.

Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the original screenplay, is an openly gay man who also won an Academy Award for writing “Milk,” and he believes that once you realize Hoover was a deeply closeted and conflicted homosexual then he becomes more understandable and even elicits a little sympathy.

In what has to be the most chilling scene of fear and self-loathing afflicted onto a gay son by his mother, the dominating Mrs.

Hoover mocks J. Edgar for not wanting to dance with women. She reminds him of his boyhood friend Daffy (short for Daffodil), who had a fondness for dressing in girl’s clothes, a “perversion” that led to his total disgrace and suicide.  “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son,” she adds in her steely soft voice.

With that kind of upbringing and with the stark homophobia of his day, it’s no mystery, except to some straight critics, that Hoover:

• felt he had to do everything better than any other man, a real overachiever

• became obsessive about other people’s secrets, particularly those for whom there were gay rumors, such as Eleanor Roosevelt

• crushed those who suggested he might be gay and carrying on a relationship with his deputy Clyde Tolson (widely rumored in his lifetime)

• worked hard to cultivate a macho image, encouraging movies and comic books to depict him as a gun-toting hero

• demanded that all FBI agents be clean cut, All-American men, no blemishes on their character, and in excellent physical shape. In other words, ultra-straight looking and acting

• was a control freak about every aspect of his public life, which is often true of people who fear their inner life and desires may not be so controllable

• when asked why he hadn’t married, he said he was married to his job of protecting American citizens

You can’t make an honest film about a man with great flaws without having some of those same flaws in the film itself. The movie “J. Edgar” has both strengths and weaknesses, noble goals and ignoble means, disjointed at times, emotionally reticent, and it doesn’t wrap things up in a neat package at the end.  Eastwood has given us a movie that’s very much like what Hoover was like himself. The form and the content are one. That may not always be easy for the moviegoer to follow, but it is brilliant moviemaking.

Leonardo DiCaprio is equally brilliant as Hoover, capturing Hoover’s contradictions in a nuanced performance spanning from age 24 to 77. It’s a tour de force that will be Oscar nominated. As Clyde Tolson, Arnie Hammer (“The Social Network”) proves he has acting chops as well as good looks, in a performance where he has to always suggest more than his words can say. The wonderful Judi Dench plays the not-so-wonderful Mama Hoover.

Hoover and Tolson were inseparable colleagues and companions for 42 years. They had lunch and dinner together almost every day.

They took their vacations together (often to Miami Beach). They had adjoining offices at the FBI. They even dressed alike. At Hoover’s funeral, the American flag that draped his coffin was folded by the military guard and given to Tolson. Whether they had a sexual relationship the film leaves somewhat up to you, but it’s clear that the closest thing each man had to a marriage was the relationship they had with each other.

Hoover is buried in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery with Clyde Tolson’s grave only a few feet away, but it’s Hoover’s mother who lies by his side within their own fenced-off area. After all, closeted stories never have Hollywood endings.

J. Edgar Hoover

1895 – 1972

Served as the nation’s
“top cop” for 48 years
under eight presidents
from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon

Director of Bureau of Investigation
1924 – 1935

Founding Director
of the FBI
1935 – 1972

Longest serving head of a major Federal agency in American history

Pioneer in the use of
forensic science in the
solving of crimes

Never married