Hollywoodland
Review by Fritz Esker
Have you ever found yourself reading the site and wondered "Which one of these guys is better at air hockey?" Well, we found out this weekend. James' birthday party featured a sixteen person air hockey tournament and, lo and behold, we met in the semi-finals. He beat me. I'm not the kind of guy who makes excuses, but I would like to say that I was wearing a wrist brace, I felt sorry for James because it was his birthday, I was upset because of Katrina, his arms are longer than mine, and the cigarette smoke distracted me. Anyway, we will have a splurge of new reviews this week, then a lull for a few days while James goes to Mexico. Barring imprisonment or a nightmarish scenario such as that depicted in the recent Mexico-set horror novel The Ruins, James will return and we will have another gush of reviews next week, as I will have reviews of Little Miss Sunshine, Snakes on a Plane, and possibly Beerfest by mid to late next week.
Before I get started with the review, I should say that I am a HUGE fan of mysteries, both in literature and in cinema. I love noir. Most of my favorite authors (Carl Hiaasen, Dashiell Hammett, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane, Caleb Carr, Raymond Chandler) write mysteries of some sort. So, when I saw the preview for Hollywoodland, I was quite eager to see an attempt to merge a detective story with a story of Hollywood greed and excess. Sadly, Hollywoodland mostly misses the mark.
Ben Affleck plays George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV in the fifties. Reeves seemingly commits suicide, but his mother (Lois Smith) is suspicious and ends up hiring seedy private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) to investigate. The film jumps back and forth in time, telling Simo's story of the investigation while flashing back to Reeves' story. Reeves had an affair with the wife (Diane Lane) of an MGM V.P. (Bob Hoskins). Brody's investigation leads him down this path and leads him to believe that the studio honcho may have offed his wife's lover.
On paper, this seems like it could be interesting and a few individual scenes work, such as the one where Reeves faces down a disturbed young fan with a gun. However, Hollywoodland mostly calls to mind earlier, better films. Most obviously, any detective film set in L.A. will call comparisons to Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. However, the Reeves half of the story, which deals with the decadent, sleazy side of the life of a TV star, recalls 2002's far better Auto Focus (about the life and mysterious death of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane). It's combination of detective story and showbiz flashback story calls to mind last year's little seen and underrated Where the Truth Lies.
While Hollywoodland is never bad, it always fails to measure up to its predecessors. The best detective movies (Chinatown, L.A. Confidential) start slowly and gradually ratchet up the tension until the suspenseful climax. Hollywoodland, on the other hand, plods at the same methodical pace for its 126 minute running time. This is not a problem during the first 30-60 minutes, but when the second hour kicks in and the film still seems to lack urgency, that's a problem.
Even though a film like Where the Truth Lies mostly pulled off the gimmick of telling a present-day detective story while engaging in lengthy flashbacks about the famous suspects involved, Hollywoodland suffers from its dual stories. In the end, both Brody and Affleck's characters feel underdeveloped. I never felt like I knew enough about them and eventually felt that the film should have followed one story and stuck with it.
Again, this is nothing awful, but it could have been a lot better.