Allen Coulter: Hollywoodland (2006)

Melancholy takes a dive

Hollywoodland is a period neo-noir whose basic premise is that we associate the late Forties and early Fifties with failure and melancholy. It's a true story, that the man who played Superman on TV killed himself. Why? Or was there foul play? The movie weaves a complex spell by alternating between recaps of the actor's life and a maverick private dick's attempts to ferret out the truth about his death. Ben Affleck is the actor, George Reeves; Adrien Brody is the detective, Louis Simo. This is really the story of multiple failures. While Reeves is embarrassed by being supported by his mistress Toni (Diane Lane), wife of tough MGM boss Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), detective Simo too is haunted by a failed marriage and a career that's turned bad on him. Incidentally Brody and Affleck, the latter more dramatically, suffer in real life from a recent past that has Oscar glitter in it that's gone stale with less brilliant performances since. Ben Affleck was brave to take the less than heroic role of would-be star and TV loser Superman George Reeves; his pal Matt Damon has seemed to leave him in the dust since their golden moment of the Best Screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998. Damon took interesting, edgy roles, nabbed the classy Bourne actioner franchise and shares the glitter of buddies George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Soderbergh's Oceans remakes while Affleck mostly has had neither good roles nor big box office. George Reeves, whose career has gone nowhere since a minor role in Gone with the Wind, may be embarrassingly close to Affleck's own fate. But Affleck's gamble pays off in a good performance -- already rewarded by a prize at the Venice Festival. Diane Lane is well cast as aging beauty Toni who's as glamorous and brave as she can be as a woman whose husband has a girlfriend and whose boyfriend is going nowhere.

The essence of Hollywoodland is that it's a kind of messy meditation. The constant alternation between flashbacks to Reeves' life and Simo's punchy investigation keeps giving us time to savor the contrast and think back on what's just been shown and question the reality or meaning of it. Simo keeps getting beaten up by flunkies of the studio boss who want him to stop stirring up trouble. As in Chinatown, there's a female client, this time Reeves' mother, whose story is not to be trusted. When we see Reeves flail about looking for other work and get interested in another woman quite without Toni's polish, but younger, we don't know who he is and he doesn't either. Simo seems to be trying to redeem his failed life with his destructive search for truth. Alternative possibilities are shown in an almost Rashomon-like narrative of the actor's demise.

All this is subtle and rich, and this is a movie that slowly grows on you. But it happens just a little bit too slowly. The languorous pacing is one reason why this movie never develops the zing of an L.A. Confidential or the wit and resonance of a Chinatown. These are evoked enough so the comparison has to be made, and the new movie doesn't measure up. Sometimes the music even sounds too like Chinatown's. But nice as the mood of Hollywoodland is, there's really no comparison with Polanski's Seventies classic. Characters aren't as vivid, dialogue isn't as sharp. There are few truly powerful scenes. Reeves/Affleck's character, who actually does slip off the wires in a Superman shoot and crash to the floor, falls flat. The moment is truthful, but too much a metaphor for the whole film.

George Reeves (Brewer) is an interesting footnote in Hollywood, and suffered from WWII just as many stars did after the war. Before the war, he actually worked in several films in a starring role, such as "So Proudly We Hail!" In the late forties, unable to find work, he moved to New York and worked in television for years before being discover in a 'cattle call' for Superman. At the time he was working for Roto-rooter! Evidently he hated children and seldom interacted with fans according to his biographer, Jim Beaver. The little tykes used to punch him in the stomach to test the Man of Steel!

Reeves also did most of his own stunts, learning to jump on a springboard for take-offs and swing in through windows from a bar hanging just off camera. He got so good, he could drop six feet as if landing and go right into dialogue without a cut, something the low-budget production appreciated.


"Children are very good to have around... especially when roasted." WC Fields

The movie shows his dislike of his child fans. There's a scene where he nods to them inside a building but refuses to go out. But his earlier flim career pre-WWII isn't really dealt with. I have some confusion about the time-scheme of the film. Though it has nice period details, some of them seem to me from an earlier time, given that he died, wasn't it, in 1959? And a 1949 or 1950 Studebaker is admired as if new. But I'm no expert on this kind of thing....

In some way, I almost longed to have this movie focus exclusively on George Reeves history and make it more of a docudrama than a mystery crime thriller told with flashbacks. I would have like enjoyed this movie without Adrien Brody whose time spent on screen seemed to detract from Ben Affleck's performance. Interestly, I actually enjoyed Superman's fall from the wires scene and the resulting performance by Ben Affleck, it was so revealing about his character and the nature of the business at the time. Diane Lane, I thought, was superb and the whole initial meeting between Diane Lane and Ben Affleck and the development of their relationship as portrayed on screen was special and a delight.

I agree on the elements you praise, and Adrian Brody element is certainly not quite a complete success, though I didn't dislike Brody as much as some have, and the noir thing still appeals to me.

Next stop, Black Dahlia.

As someone with much more than a passing interest in Golden Era Hollywood and, particularly, the films made then, I concluded I had to watch Hollywoodland. Not that my expectations were high, given that the director and the writer had worked exclusively for television. At least, I thought to myself, I get to watch Bob Hoskins and Diane Lane, who always give me pleasure. And Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody seem, on paper, just right for the roles they are playing.

The film exceeded my expectations. And I woud credit the actors abovementioned, Paul Bernbaum's script and the crew members involved in period recreation. As far as the visual aspects of the film, even critics who break the mold and review movies as something other than filmed theatre have little to say. Hollywoodland could have been directed by any of many competent yet unremarkable directors. When compared with other films with similar themes helmed by directors like Curtis Hanson and Roman Polanski (especially), Hollywoodland simply can't measure up.

Yet Hollywoodland has much more to say about 50s Hollywood than L.A. Confidential. Tabuno's comment that Superman's fall-from-the-wires scene was "so revealing about the nature of the business at the time" really applies to the film as a whole, not only to that one scene. Hollywoodland is wise and knowing about the false and artificial nature of filmmaking and the star-making machinery. About movies as magic tricks, as pure make-believe, and about how Hollywood fabricates its stars' public images. The script adroitly illustrates the execs' devotion to the bottom line (all Mannix has to say about Gone With the Wind is "That picture made money"), the consequences and capriciousness of fame ("An actor can't always act, sometimes he has to work"), the dangers of an actor being overidentified with a role (a test screening of From Here to Eternity suggests some scenes involving Reeves were edited out of that film because audiences could only think of him as Superman), and aging in a town obsessed with youth ("I have another seven good years before my ass drops like a duffel bag", Toni tells George). Hollywoodland manages to incorporate, as part of Louis Simo's backstory, a moving reference to the so-called Battle of Burbank, which involved studio honchos hiring goons to violently disrupt a strike. The script is rich in character detail and period references, as when Reeves' old-school manager takes a jab at the increasingly popular method-acting.

Hollywoodland is, above all, character-driven drama. Jonathan Rosenbaum's statement that "the major characters are more complex than those in Chinatown" is valid, or at least worth pondering. Reeves and Simo in particular emerge as multi- dimensional and nuanced. Many others such as Reeves' manager and the Mannixes make a strong impression, even with limited screen time. The performances by a distinguished cast are up to their best previous work. The exception being Robin Tunney, who's too old at 34 to play the role of a girl Reeves falls for because she makes him "feel young". Moreover, Tunney plays Leonore as a consistently unpleasant and self-destructive creature. As characterized here, I found it hard to believe Reeves would get engaged to her and break up with the alluring and fun Toni.

Finding out the truth about how George Reeves died seems to me like an excuse to spend a couple of hours getting acquainted with these people, the time and place in which they lived, and the wonderful and terrible things they did. The film's refusal to provide a definite resolution to its central question is bound to prove unsatisfactory to mystery-heads. I bet the film would have made more money if it stuck closer to genre rules. More reason to respect its courage to tell us that sometimes the truth is unknowable.

Thanks for bringing out a lot more of the good stuff that's there.

You're welcome. This movie carries extra appeal for film buffs because it's so richly referential. Another scene that comes to mind takes place in a diner. Simo's former partner says of him: "Nobody told him the world doesn't need two Ralph Meekers". Meeker played "cheap and sleazy" Mike Hammer in the cult noir Kiss Me Deadly (a film which, by the way, ends most atypically with Hammer failing to avert a nuclear explosion).

My praise of Mr. Bernbaum for the script is perhaps not fully deserved. According to the usually dependable Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune), playwright Howard Korder provided an "uncredited assist" to Bernbaum. I've been unable to confirm this information or to learn of the extent of Korder's assistance.

In response to Chris' assertion that it "happens a bit too slowly": I also had the same impression, "a bit" like you say. If you hadn't mentioned it I would have dismissed it as the reaction of a viewer who was a bit tired at the end of a workday. The film could have probably been brought under two hours without appreciable losses. Overall, I liked Hollywoodland enough to watch again when it comes out on dvd.

I'm curious as to whether Chris, Tabuno and anyone else who has seen it strongly favors any of the theories as to who's responsible for Reeves' death.

I'm the person who loves Lost In Translation (2003) and who knows what was said at the end of the movie and does it really matter? As a non-practicing Buddhist (whatever that means), the lack of a preference or specific who done it scenario to Hollywoodland is also fine with me. I actually prefer not to have a preference as well as the way the movie approached its ending. Too many movies try to tie up American style the black and white, the scientific answers to all questions requirement by which to judge everything, including movies. The ambiguity of such movies is much more realistic and more meaningful in connecting the way in which people relate to life, at least those that are most happy (I presume). Otherwise, it would be fantasyland.

If the evidence isn't really there, then the conspiracy theorists of the world could come up with an endless amount of material for movies that will tantalize and satisfy every tastes, except the practical reality of one.

The movie has its own answer but to go into that would be to indulge in spoiler talk.

I thought the film is less assertive in providing an answer to the mystery than you do, Chris. Then again, I think I know what you think is "the answer".

(Possible Spoilers) The fact that the film doesn't give us valid reasons to suspect Reeves' fiance and that it chooses to keep mum about Reeves' previous suicide attempts points in the direction of the Mannixes. But it does so with a great deal of ambiguity, and the "suicide solution" is never truly ruled out.

Oscar's excellent historical essay is in itself sufficient to provide this movie with its motivation and accolades. Like a novel's requirement for one to use one's imagination to experience the plot, a movie provides the visual and acoustic experience, but this movie's rich plotline requires one to use one's own intuitive imagination as to the reality of the experience and possible explanations.

Thank you for your kind words. Your comments regarding how Hollywoodland encourages a specific type of viewer participation are very eloquently stated.

Do you offer education credits?