As we move into fall, when most art forms roll out their most serious efforts, and movies follow suit with a parade of shameless Academy bait, the fixers are attempting to position Hollywoodland as a noir throwback that’ll bring L.A. to the water. Or something.
Banish all fantasies of Chinatown, part the second, now. Hollywoodland, like the stories it’s clearly trying to emulate—not just Polanski’s classic, but L.A. Confidential, Auto Focus, and others—presents a revisionist take on a footnote in Golden State history. In this case: Was George Reeves, erstwhile television Superman, truly a suicide? While Chinatown‘s footnote really was a footnote—water rights at the dawn of Hollywood civilization—and one awash in clear, blue possibility, all Hollywoodland has to offer is just another hopped-up celebrity conspiracy theory.
Adrien Brody plays Louis Simo, a weirdly antsy private dick who preys on crumbling marriages while ignoring the sad state of his own. We know he’s desperate because his number-one client isn’t just any jealous husband, but a sweaty, murderous freak. (Thankfully, the detective has a pretty young secretary to keep him from dwelling on the unpleasant implications of his work.) When George Reeves’s bereaved mother approaches Simo about the supposed suicide of her son, he gladly accepts her checks; if he has any compunction about exploiting her grief, he doesn’t let on. But his mock investigation rapidly escalates into a genuine obsession. Who, Simo wonders, could have hated television’s Man of Steel more than he hated himself?
Photographed in warmed-over sepia, the antithesis of noir’s hard contrasts, Hollywoodland struggles mightily to evoke both grit (Simo’s story) and glamour (frequent flashbacks to George Reeves’s life and hypothetical ends). Alternate explanations for Reeves’s death proliferate: Maybe his sex kitten of a girlfriend (Robin Tunney) got mad. Maybe the gangster-turned-Hollywood-mogul (Bob Hoskins), who was married to Reeves’s former mistress, reverted to his bad old ways. But if none of these possibilities can be said to hold much interest, the odd, backward-looking atmosphere must be held partly to blame.
The hostile underbelly of the city is the implicit subject in many films noir, whether produced during their heyday—the 1940s and ’50s—or thereafter. But despite its citified title, Hollywoodland is preoccupied with our retrospective invention of the 1950s; and that means suburbia and the nuclear family. We don’t expect to find conspiracies here, but the familiar theme of silent domestic strife feels right at home. More so than murder or detective work, Hollywoodland is hung up on the legacy of ’50s masculinity.
In an uncharacteristically nuanced performance, Ben Affleck presents Reeves as a sensitive man trapped in insensitive circumstances. Everything in his life seems designed to cut him down. Reeves plays Superman, a near parody of American beefcake, but only on the sissified small screen. (At one point, as he pretends to fly through a shallow studio set, the wires snap, and he collapses to the ground in an undignified heap.) His audience is composed of children. (In the movie’s tensest, most cleanly paced scene, a little kid brandishes a gun and proposes to bounce a bullet off Reeves’s reputedly impervious body.) Reeves may hobnob with Hollywood greats, but only in the guise of a kept man. His mistress (also played beautifully, by Diane Lane) even buys him his house. In other words, he’s loved for his body, not his earning power. Perhaps he would have been happier in the metrosexual fin-de-siècle.
Maybe a movie that dwelled more obviously on Reeves’s sympathetic crisis of masculinity might have been intolerable. I was no fan of American Beauty. But one thing is clear: The meat of Hollywoodland is bound up in this little personal drama, where what qualifies as “evidence” can extend to a Super-8 movie indicating Superman may have been suffering from clinical depression. The detective drama, less than ably anchored by Brody, feels perfunctory in comparison. Is this a film noir padded with introspective navel gazing? Or is it introspective navel gazing gussied up with the trappings of film noir? Forget hard-boiled—Hollywoodland is unevenly poached. 
