DIRECTOR: Clint Eastwood

CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench

Cling Eastwood has been refining and intensifying his directorial style for years, but with J. Edgar it is the first time it has felt like self-parody.

Eastwood's best recent work - Gran Torino, Mystic River and his outstanding Iwo Jima diptych - has been thoughtfully paced, strenuously sincere and sparingly lit, but, in his biopic of the first director and co-founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it's too much.

The sincerity is stifling, the pacing glacial, and the lighting only a few notches above a power cut.

Eastwood opens on a middle-aged Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) in his pomp, dictating his memoirs to an FBI minion.

From here on, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black takes us back through the key moments in his adult life, although Hoover's self-congratulatory voice-over suggests some scenes might not be entirely accurate.

We see Hoover as a 24-year-old rising star in the justice department, his appointment as the sixth director of the bureau of investigation, his war against folk-hero outlaws such as John Dillinger, his long-running investigation into the kidnap of the young son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh, and his obsessive hoarding of secret files and wiretap evidence on just about everybody.

Black makes much of the widely circulated rumour that Hoover was a closet homosexual. The contrast between his straight-arrow public persona, his private scheming and his tender but sexless relationship with his long-standing deputy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) provides - in theory, at least - the dramatic bite.

DiCaprio's Hoover is almost completely implausible as a human being, let alone as a psychologically complex and compelling character. A key problem is the voice. His drawl is so laboured that he often sounds as if he's introducing himself as "Ms DaWhovah."

The old-age make-up employed as Hoover reaches middle-age is, if anything, even more distracting, and the details of both DiCaprio and Hammer's performances are lost underneath thick, squidgy layers of prosthetics.

We get no meaningful or even coherent impression of what kind of man he actually was. Still, none of the supporting characters seems to be able to get a handle on him either: not his faithful secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), to whom he pragmatically proposes marriage after a hot date at the reference library, nor his elderly mother Anna Marie, played by Judi Dench.

Eastwood's film says more about its director than its subject, and sadly, what it says isn't flattering.