Hollywoodland
Allen Coulter (2006)
Hollywoodland is about the death of the actor George Reeves, the first incarnation of Superman on American television. His alleged suicide in Beverly Hills in 1959 is investigated by a private detective called Louis Simo, who, in the course of the picture, imagines different explanations of how a bullet found its way into Reeves’s brain. Simo ends up wondering if it was Reeves who pulled the trigger after all. The truth about the death of Superman becomes both increasingly elusive and, compared with the immediacy of the problems Simo is encountering in his own personal life, an increasingly abstract question. In this sense, there’s an eventual convergence between Simo’s point of view and the audience’s state of mind. A main problem with Allen Coulter’s film – from a screenplay by Paul Bernbaum – is that, unlike Simo, we struggle all the way through to be engrossed by the unsolved nature of the shooting.
Perhaps Coulter means to demonstrate the intractable difficulty of making, in the twenty-first century, a private detective noir with a life of its own. (If memory serves, the DVD of Hollywoodland became notorious as an example of the director using the featurettes to explain what the film he’d made really meant and why it was so clever.) Certainly Hollywoodland seems like a pastiche at more than one remove. The LA setting, the use (at least at the beginning) of sunlight to intensify mystery, elements in Marcelo Zarvos’s score, even the private eye with the injured nose – all bring Chinatown to mind. But whereas the texture of film noir is fully absorbed into the Polanski movie, here we seem to be watching the construction of texture. The effect of this – in combination with the mystery of Reeves’s death – gives Hollywoodland a kind of tantalising sluggishness for a while, until tantalising becomes irritating. (There’s also of course the ‘curse of Superman’ element to entice the cognoscenti in the audience – although if you read and believe the Wikipedia article on this you realise the curse theory wouldn’t amount to much without George Reeves and Christopher Reeve.)
This sense of the whole enterprise being suffocated by the Hollywood past bleeds through to the performances but they’re interesting nonetheless. I found Adrien Brody so effective in The Pianist partly because I didn’t remember him from any other role. Without the benefit of novelty, it’s hard to tell from his interpretation of Louis Simo how good an actor Brody is. He spends too much time self-consciously playing a detective in a genre picture and in that respect he’s rarely convincing – but this may be because he’s too original a screen presence. (His looks are eccentric and he has a distinctive sweet-natured quality.) Brody has strong audience rapport; he’s highly engaging whenever he stops trying to animate a type. As Toni Mannix, the wife of the general manager of MGM studios who falls in love with George Reeves, Diane Lane also seems trapped in pastiche but this gives added tension to her fine performance. One of the strongest moments in Hollywoodland occurs, near the end of the film, when Coulter confounds noir conventions. As Toni stands with her back to the camera, her tyrannical husband asks her, in an uncharacteristically mild tone of voice, to turn round. The long delay before she does leads you to expect a black eye or worse; in fact Lane’s face simply looks expressively older and beautifully careworn. The director delivers surprise again when Eddie Mannix (an accomplished Bob Hoskins) takes his wife’s face in his hand, and stays gentle with her.
Ben Affleck’s portrait of George Reeves was much admired but I think it’s only partly successful. Affleck gets across well that inadvertent, oppressive anxiety the camera keeps picking up from certain hunk actors of the period (especially Rock Hudson). The trouble is that Affleck reflects Reeves’s contempt for being reduced to TV work too clearly. As Superman, he lacks a brilliant façade and isn’t credible as a hero to millions of American children of the time. (This strand in the film, particularly the effect of Reeves’s death on Simo’s unhappy son (Zach Mills), is overdone in any case.) Affleck’s Reeves is so mired in introverted self-loathing that he becomes rather ugly. It’s hard to see what women, Toni Mannix especially, see in him. There’s good work in minor roles from Molly Parker (as Simo’s estranged wife) and Caroline Dhavernas (as the girl he’s moved in with) – and, although she’s a little too emphatic, from Lois Smith as Reeves’s mother.
13 May 2010