This movie shows the life story of J Edgar Hoover , the legendary director of the FBI---the man who built it into the formidable organisation that it is today .

It shows how little power it had in the beginning , and how Edgar built it step by step to fight the internal security threats to the land of the free---America , what else.....

And even in 1919 , before the era of the cold war has begun , threat that Edgar perceives to the American way is that of communism.....
For the bolshevics have taken power in Russia and are hellbent on spreading communism everywhere......
From giving radical speeches to bombblasting people , they are trying to foment revolution across the world.....

It is upto people like Edgar to protect the Americans from this danger.....
And protect them he does , by taking risks to his career as he has to bend the official rules many a time .

.......And as the great depression of 1929 strikes , Edgar moves onto facing the next danger , that of rising criminality among the population which has turned to crime as they have lost their jobs due to the collapsing economy .
What makes his job even more difficult is the fact that unlike the contempt they have for communism , common people regard the gangsters as heroes in the depressed economic times . But Edgar triumphs over the gangsters too , catching many and teaching many a lesson they will never forget.....

And as always , he bends the rules to do so.....
Which prompts some Presidents to think of removing him.....

No problem for our intrepid hero......
He uses the FBI to keep tabs on their personal lives , and if threatened with removal , he subtly threatens to expose the personal lives of the high and mighty , like President Roosevelt's wife's affairs or President Kennedy's romp in the bed with an East German communist woman......

So presidents come and go , but J Edgar Hoover is a constant , a permanent factor in the security system of the world's most powerful democracy......

And he keeps his image in the mind of the American public as a larger than life hero , by creating photo-ops and planting fictitious stories in the press about how he caught such and such criminal or how he personally fought and arrested such and such lawbreaker......

All this fine , but there is a major flaw in the film.....
And the flaw is that the movie concentrates too much on Edgar's personal life.....

But what is so fascinating about his personal life that the movie has to change gear ??
It is the fact that the final protector of western democracy from the scourge of communism , the pillar of America's much vaunted security apparatus , his homoness....err.....his highness J Edgar Hoover is....is gay !!

And the movie spends way too much of its time in showing Edgar's lack of interest in women and his affair with his aide Mr Tolson .
And this ruins the movie as the parts showing all this move very slowly and reduce it to a personal story rather than how Edgar was in the thick of fighting America's enemies .

Also way too much time is spent in showing the kidnapping of the baby of American hero Charles Lindbergh and its investigation and aftermath .

In the end Edgar dies in office during the presidency of Richard Nixon .
But as Nixon's agents move to scour Edgar's office to find out what secrets he has kept from them , they find it empty......
All his secret files have been destroyed by his faithful secretary Miss Grandy---the old cocksucker ( as Nixon calls him ) has outwitted the president one last time.....

And the director of the film ( Clint Eastwood !! He should have stuck to western movies , really ) has outwitted me too---out of my money.....
......For frankly , I didn't like the film at all....

Verdict---not good .