Emile de Antonio’s
last film, Mr. Hoover and I, is an engagingly self-revealing final
statement, providing conveniently potted reasons why we might feel like going
back to rediscover his earlier work (which covers McCarthyism, Vietnam, the JFK
assassination, Nixon and more), laying down a case for his own importance even
if we don’t do that. The film consists largely of direct-to-camera address,
interspersed with loosely-curated life glimpses, primarily of de Antonio
hanging out in John Cage’s kitchen (given the time spent on watching Cage
preparing bread, it’s perhaps peculiar we never get a glimpse of the finished
loaf) and getting a haircut from his wife. De Antonio slips in the fact he’s
been married six times and name-drops a plethora of other famous friends, and his
self-mythologizing sometimes becomes a bit excessive, such as in his assertion
that he’s had to endure everything short of the death penalty. His factoids and
reminiscences often seem somewhat disconnected - for example, he dangles a
single observation that he suggests goes a long way to proving Lee Harvey
Oswald couldn’t have acted alone, before immediately moving on (this is one
movie you wouldn’t mind being longer, assuming the added time went into hard
information rather than into more haircut footage). The peculiar shapelessness
is particularly evident in the treatment of its titular subject, with long
stretches where J. Edgar Hoover isn’t much mentioned, the scattered anecdotes
and indictments not quite adding to a coherent sense of Hoover’s overall place
in history. De Antonio comments that aspects of Hoover’s behaviour betrayed
delusions of royalty (for example, his insistence when staying in a hotel that
an elevator always be waiting on his floor with the doors open); it’s one of
several respects in which the film, when viewed in the age of Trump, brings to
mind that while (as per the director’s closing comments) history may not repeat
itself, it persistently throws up corrupted and degraded echoes.
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