HOLLYWOODLAND deals with the death of George Reeves, television’s Superman and the idol of millions of kids who were devastated by not just his passing, but that it was reported to have been suicide. It was during a party at his house, when he went upstairs and was later found with a bullet through his brain. The film, though, uses that as the touchstone to consider the larger issue of the effect the Dream Factory that is Hollywood has on both the national psyche and that of the individual. In doing so, it becomes a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work marred only by the disastrous casting of Ben Affleck as the doomed Reeves.
What did or didn’t happen to Reeves becomes the focus of one Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a low-rent private eye, divorced and on the skids after being fired from a glitzy detective agency, who sees this case as his ticket to the big time. Glibly ingratiating himself with Reeves’ mother, he launches a media blitz, with himself in every photo, to have the case re-opened. Along the way, he gets more than he bargained for. There’s the evidence that the police missed through carelessness or the influence of a Hollywood mogul. Then there’s Reeves himself, seen in flashbacks as Simo digs deeper, listening to sometimes conflicting stories of who Reeves was and what may or may not have happened to him. Inevitably, the clues lead to Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), and his younger wife, Toni (Diane Lane), who was openly having an affair with Reeves.
Clues and red herrings cleverly become one in the same as motives become double-edged swords, and everyone involved wears several masks, any one of which is real, depending on the point of view, and the expediency of the moment. Suspicion falls on Mannix, though he gladly bought the house Toni gave to Reeves, and on Toni, who was being brushed aside in favor of Reeves’ fiancée, and on the fiancée herself, for reasons as peculiar as the circumstances of Reeves’ death.
There have been many films about the seamy underbelly of show business and this one doesn’t reveal anything new, but it tells the story with a tantalizing sense of foreboding, for all the excessive California sunlight, and not just for the doomed actor at the center of the mystery. Even from the vantage point of the 21st century, watching Toni, Mannix, Reeves, and Mannix’s mistress all having an oh so civilized lunch together is jarring, not for any question of morals, but because everyone at the table is playing part for the other patrons and for each other. Moreover, each wants something from the others there that is unspoken but perfectly understood, though not guaranteed. The dialogue between Hoskins and Lane delivered with a bright and brittle insouciance as these two pros play off each other flawlessly.
The pace of the film is dragged down by two subplots. One involves Simo’s guilt over being an absent father as we watches his son dealing with Reeve’s suicide. The other is a second case he’s working at the same time, watching a woman whose husband suspects the worst about her. Both underscore the larger themes, but too obliquely to gain any real traction, becoming instead distractions.
And then there’s Affleck. He’s got the firm jaw and the good looks, but the futile attempts to convey Reeves’ conflicted emotions at finally finding fame, but on the small screen, not the big one, are enough to make an audience squirm in its collective seat. Everyone remembering Reeves talks about his fatal charm, but Affleck never summons up more than a jaunty tilt to his chin and a determined smile, not to mention a peculiar accent that garbles word with too many vowels, like Lois, which is a name he says a lot during the course of the film. Being essentially unlikable onscreen makes Reeves’ being ground up in the machinery of Hollywood less a tragedy than a Darwinian inevitability – tough but essentially fair. That he plays so many scenes with Lane only makes the problem more glaring. She is a fragile torrent of emotion playing a woman who pretends to herself without quite succeeding, that she’s come to terms with many things, including her husband’s infidelity and her fading looks. She’s the heart and soul of the film and its metaphor, eclipsing even Brody, whose sad eyes and dogged hope that he’s one smart move away from finding happiness is a ironic contrast on every level. Each has the same haunted look lurking just beneath the bravado.
HOLLYWOODLAND captures the angst of people tantalized by dreams fueled by the fantasy of insubstantial images on a silver screen. And it gets the hollowness of that just right. When Simo is being needled by his ex-coworkers, they accuse him, correctly, of trying to be Ralph Meeker. Not Robert Mitchum, not Alan Ladd, not Humphrey Bogart, none of the icons that resonate now as richly as they did in their heyday. Stylish and stark, it is a cautionary tale told with a wealth of compassion for its players who reduce themselves to little more than commodities for one another, but with vitriol for what brought them to that state.
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