It was a Grand Jury Prize nominee at the Venice Film Festival and had won Ben Affleck a Volpi Cup, so I decided to check this movie out.
It follows a fictionalised version of the death of TV actor George Reeves who was known for playing Superman in a 50s TV show, hence the alternate title of the movie.
Ben Affleck plays George Reeves in what you might call one of the best performances of his career. There’s a held back charm in his performance which flows freely throughout the flim and works out in the favor of his character, an actor moderately famous, however still struggling to make a real name for himself in the industry.
He’s caught in a affair and is used by the wife of a famous movie producer, played wonderfully by Diane Lane. Events unfold and ultimately his career suffers after he leaves her for another woman (played by Robin Tunney) whose intention is also to use him.
It is suggested he got extremely depressed and took his own life one day.
Enter Adrien Brody also in a phenomenal performance as Private Detective Louis Simo who is hired by George’s mother as she suspects his son’s suicide was infact murder.
This sets the detective on a tough path as he finds himself up against one of the most powerful people in the industry.
What makes this film special is that despite seeming like a detective drama it doesn’t play itself out as one. If you’ve seen the movie you know how it ends, the ending does not reveal whether George was murdered or he killed himself. Now one might wonder what even the point of this almost 2 hour long exercise was.
In the runtime we learn about George and Louis’ humanity.
The ending is not the completion of a murder mystery case but rather the culmination of a moral arc.
The detective learns about himself and life as he tries to find signs of what really happened.
You get to know the characters for not how they appear or what they seem but for what they really are. How people put up faces and hide what’s really going on. How people in the entertainment industry are essentially selfish regardless of what they seem like.
We learn a lot both from George and Louis’ perspective.
The movie achieves what it sets out to do to a great extent but fails to give enough time to breathe to some of its other characters, like George’s fiancé Leonore (Robin Tunney) and Louis’ Girlfriend Kit (Caroline Dhavernas).
Allen Coulter does a great job in his director’s chair. This was his first feature film of the 2 he has directed (as of 2020), the other one being Remember Me (starring Robert Pattinson), a decent movie which suffered form a terrible ending. In this movie, a great job otherwise in making a 50s noir.
Hollywoodland fails to provide a proper ending to every story it tries to tell and that is where the problem lies.
Paul Bernbaum (writer) tries to pin this as a tragedy and in several manners it plays itself as one but never completely.
Fueled by compelling performances from Ben Affleck, Adrien Brody, Diane Lane and a clever direction from Allen Coulter,
Hollywoodland is fun to watch but falls short of all the great noirs of it’s time and finds itself in the sea of all the could-be great movies.
A wonderful experience, otherwise.
Watch it if slow paced movies do not bother you.
7/10
Everything Cinema 