HOLLYWOODLAND (2006)
Lazy, inept and incoherent muddying of the death of George Reeves in 1959. There are a few ideas here about who may have fired the fatal shot, none explored deep enough to be called theories, not even the generally accepted suicide scenario.
The laziness extends to the limp title, an eleventh hour replacement, evidently, for the working title Truth, Justice and the American Way, itself uninspired. The “land” part of the famous Hollywood sign was completely gone by the end of 1948, three years before this narrative picks up Reeves, crashing a Hollywood party and starting a fateful affair with Toni Mannix (Diane Lane, looking and acting, at times, like Norma Desmond), wife of thuggish MGM executive Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins, playing Bob Hoskins playing any one of his thuggish characters). Later in the narrative and in the chronology begins the Superman TV show which would be Reeves’s claim to fame.
The filmmakers seem aware of the title’s anachronism and inexactness; every Hollywood in the 50s visual cliché is dragged out and polished off for this one, but the sign itself, a glaring absence in a film that doesn’t look like cinema as much as a flip book of postcards and snapshots from Grandma’s photo album.
There’s another problem with Hollywoodland: it isn’t one unfocussed narrative, but two. Our framing narrative is of a pulp novel gumshoe, deadbeat dad, and alcoholic who is poking around the death of Reeves. This doesn’t frame the Reeves back-story, since the things we find out about Reeves correspond in no way to what the detective finds out himself. And it itself is too vague to effectively be called a narrative. No real connection exists between the two sub-films, and neither in its own right is interesting enough to carry a whole story. Alas, two dull films added together do not make one compelling one.
Ben Affleck plays Reeves. It only takes a few seconds of the first flashback to Reeves alive to see this isn’t going well–that scene starts, oddly, looking like nothing but an SNL skit gone to seed. The rest of the film affirms, again and again, that initial impression.
Adrian Brody does what he can (which isn’t much) with what he is given as the deadbeat, glib detective–the other wet-rag of a main character. We see him as an ineffective father and we begin to develop this as a subplot, and then we’re whisked away, never to return to any emotional territory here (we return, mechanically, to clichéd and meaningless scenes, here and there, willy-nilly); we have a stiff collared client who suspects his wife (incorrectly) of infidelity and his private investigator (quite correctly) of incompetence. All the while, with these and the Reeves investigation going on, Brody mopes his way through his half of the film, never stirring any sympathy for his character, or any sense of plausibility.
We begin to wonder why so much weight (and so much screen time) is placed on the gumshoe’s story line in the first place. A film about Reeves fading away in Hollywood, chafing under the burden of being “kept” by an older, more powerful woman, might have had some interest. But maybe the filmmakers here knew that that film could not have had Affleck in it. Maybe the other story line is mere mitigation.
Special note should be made of Robin Tunney. Tunney’s ability to breathe life and to pump blood into each of her scenes nearly kept the film watchable; the only reason she didn’t succeed entirely was that she was criminally under used. Her character and her performance here could have carried an entire film (a much better film, perhaps even a good one).
One day Tunney will be given enough room and enough material to do that film. Until then, we have missed opportunities (Hollywoodland) and close calls (Cherish).
HDFEST RATING:
Overall: D
Acting: D (apart from Robin Tunney, a solid A- here)
Originality: D
Enjoyability: D (but Tunney again, A)
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