Hollywoodland
Hollywoodland stars Diane Lane who first charmed me in “A Little Romance” with Laurence Olivier. Have I told you about the time I didn’t meet her? Well, that’s for another post. In this movie Adrian Brody plays a sad sack private eye in 1959 Los Angeles who gets turned onto the case of the apparent suicide of actor George Reeves as a way to make a buck and boost his business. Lane plays Toni, the bored wife of studio exec Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), who becomes Reeves’ sugar-momma, buying him a swank house and providing him some inside connections. He makes her feel young, and she makes him feel important. Reeves (Ben Affleck) drinks a lot and is frustrated by his inability to get parts in the movies. He considers his role as Superman in the low-budget TV show aimed at kids as beneath him. The movie alternates between Louis Simo’s (Brody) investigation and the life of Reeves leading up to his death.
Simo becomes genuinely intrigued by the possibility that there was a murder instead of a suicide, but the murder mystery aspects of the movie are secondary to the portrayal of characters on the margins of their professions, struggling to be successful in a town where fame is fleeting and success is all or nothing. Simo, a WWII vet, is struggling to get by and to get along with his ex-wife and their son who is devastated by the death of Superman. Reeves, who was in “Gone with the Wind”, is struggling to come to terms with the end of his moment in the Sun and the realities of grunt-work acting, and Toni is facing the golden years with a grunt. The movie is shot in the faded yellows and browns and slight overexposure reminiscent of photographs from that era. It does a good job of immersing you in the atmosphere of the time. One can’t help but notice the irony that, today, playing a comic book superhero is the height of Hollywood superstardom, while for Reeves it was the final indignity. This movie is more atmospheric than dramatic, and works better as a character study than mystery.