‘Hollywoodland’ a weak attempt at noir subversion

Spoiler warning in effect.

Ever hear of that old urban legend which stated that George Reeves—best known for the role of Superman in the classic 1950s television series—suffered from severe mental illness; that he fell to his death after leaping off a building, believing that he was really the Man of Steel? The truth of the matter doesn’t lend itself to so much morbid irony: Reeves, long despondent after the cancellation of “Superman,” was found dead in his bedroom during a small party, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “Hollywoodland” does the concept of legend one better with a touch of reality—was it really a suicide, or were there more sinister forces at play?

But all of that, that’s just peanuts, really. The Reeves death has been a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy for nearly 50 years, the kind of stuff that any paranoid political director can pick up and run with. But there’s an important idea that saves “Hollywoodland” from total mediocrity and obscurity, and it comes from its milder subplots and its conclusion. These scenes, unfortunately brief as they are, entertain the possibility that there was absolutely nothing odd or conspiratorial about Reeves’ death. It speaks to a certain sensibility within the mind—an attempt to blind ourselves from the frailty of man and the banality of which life is capable. How ordinary, how dull, how utterly human it was of Superman to put a bullet in his head; that’s why we have to create stories such as the building-leap—or more realistically, the murder—to complete our sensationalist vision of Hollywood. To follow through with these fascinating concepts, however, it must delve further into the life of Reeves, and not just an isolated series of incidents which led to his death.

In that sense, I wish that there were more scenes which featured Reeves (played by Ben Affleck in flashback mode) and fewer featuring the Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a weasely detective trying to force himself into the headlines by investigating Reeves’ supposed murder. Simo is a private dick specializing in infidelity, but even his cursory techniques reveal a long list of suspects—Reeves’ gold-digging fiancé Leonore Lemon (Telly), his mistress and financier Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), and her husband, a bigwig exec at MGM (Bob Hoskins)—and everyone seems to have the proper motive.

Both Simo and Reeves are integral to the film’s finer concepts, of that there’s no question. There’s even a brief attempt to connect Simo’s quest to that banality of life—including scenes with a delusional client, convinced that his wife is cheating on him. But beyond that, Simo doesn’t do much beyond wander through a lazily constructed noir world, and the film’s bizarre pretensions along those lines call up theoretically unwelcome comparisons to the vastly superior “Chinatown.” I say “theoretically unwelcome” because “Hollywoodland” always seems right on the crest of stealing from Roman Polanski’s classic, wishing that you’ll make the connection, love it, and provide a pandering quote for the trailers. These feelings culminate halfway through “Hollywoodland,” when Simo is roughed up by some anonymous hired goons. A resultant wound across his face remains with him throughout the rest of the film, and acts as a casual reminder of where his quest has led him, a la J.J. Gittes’ knife-slashed nose.

The integral difference is that Robert Towne’s script for “Chinatown” is so multilayered that even the most thorough deconstruction may not reveal all of its secrets. Even when considering the various suspects involved in Reeves’ death, there are no scenarios that cannot simply be played from Point A to Point B to Point C.

Alas, while Simo’s is the weaker of the two plotlines in a thematic sense, it’s also marginally better when it comes to acting. Brody remains reliably sleazy throughout the film and exists as a weak anchor to his story, but Reeves’ world suffers when it starts relying on those monologues that are designed to win awards. Diane Lane, especially, goes in like a hawk for another Oscar nomination, her every tortured word practically followed “presented for your voting consideration.” Meanwhile, Ben Affleck, inexplicably lauded in the press and film festivals, goes out on a limb and plays Reeves as Ben Affleck. Sure, he’s given to a few twinges of smarmy 1950s lingo and a screaming match or two, but there’s so little else to a performance that should be integral to the film. Admittedly, that kind of reductive acting works at first; it seems like a smart move to keep the acting stilted and phony—this is Hollywood, after all, and it’s an entire city of phonies. But as the layers are peeled back and the themes become more serious, our idea of Hollywood phoniness moves from the fictional characters to the actors onscreen.

The key to the interest and failure of the film is a simple matter of “not enough.” A two-hour running time doesn’t seem to be nearly long enough to accommodate the most interesting aspects of “Hollywoodland,” and by dividing its time between two connected but essentially disparate stories, it all adds up to something depressingly linear. There was this fellow George Reeves who became Superman, wore himself out on the Hollywood system, and died. There was this other fellow Louis Simo, who investigated his death, found out that there may have been an elaborate cover-up, except that maybe there wasn’t.

One wonders if the original script (or film) exists in some longer form unseen by the public. If an extended work indeed exists in print or on film, then I would be most interested to see the ideas that “Hollywoodland” only hints at in a fuller form: sex, scandal, death and the very real possibility that it can all add up to nothing but speculation.