I’ve heard of actors who eat up the scenery; in Hollywoodland, the scenery eats up the actors. Such meticulous attention has been paid to the period detail — the cars, the clothes, the nightclubs, even the cigarette smoke of the late 1940s and 1950s seem choreographed — that we are constantly reminded this is a period piece. Everyone looks as if they’re in costume. Still, the premise of Paul Bernbaum’s screenplay is promising. When Reeves (Ben Affleck) is found dead, everyone is convinced it’s a simple case of suicide — except his mother (Lois Smith), who suspects foul play. A lowlife private detective, Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), sees an opportunity to make some moolah and a name for himself, so he persuades her to let him investigate.
The action moves back and forth between two periods of time and two stories. There’s the Reeves saga: struggling actor begins affair with older woman (Diane Lane), lands role of Superman and lives miserably ever after. And there’s Simo’s tale: estranged husband, failed cop and absent dad trying to crack a case.You get twin plot strands because the mystery of what happened to Reeves might make a great Vanity Fair article, but doesn’t have enough drama in it for a film of two hours plus. At heart, it’s just another story of a successful television actor who couldn’t make it in the movies because he was so identified with a certain role. What lifts Reeves’s tale out of the ordinary is the fact that he played Superman — and shot himself. But as Simo points out to his distressed son, it was the actor who died, not Superman. So his death isn’t fascinating the way Marilyn Monroe’s was because it was her life, not her role(s), that fascinated people.
But if Coulter could have stuck to the tale of Reeves alone, this would have been a far better film. The story of Simo is let down by the usually excellent Brody. He’s never believable as a private detective, and the story line of his estrangement from his wife and young son is prosaic and predictable. By contrast, Affleck makes a convincing Reeves. He captures the actor’s nice, easygoing manner, giving a masterclass in understatement. But the portrait that emerges — and Coulter is to blame — is one that never gets under the man’s skin or his public smile. We don’t see the self-disgust and disappointment Reeves must have felt before he shot himself.
Overall, the film is so busy showing us the surface of things that we don’t get the intimacy with the characters we need to bring the story alive. Take the love affair between the older lover, Toni Mannix (Lane), and the young Reeves. We never know how he really felt about her. Was the age gap a problem between them? Why did he leave her for a younger model (Robin Tunney)? There’s a conspicuous gap, too, between the mythic subject matter — the death of Superman, the decline of Hollywood — and the smallness of the film. Coulter cut his directorial teeth on episodes of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and his film has a made-for-TV look. It borrows from — or should that be pays homage to? — great gothic portraits of Hollywood decline and decadence such as Sunset Boulevard and The Day of the Locust, but it hasn’t their beauty or originality. All its potential sadness is smothered by empty stylishness.
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Hollywoodland
15, 126 mins, Two stars