Dec 12, 2006 04:31 PM
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Dir: Alan Coulter.
Cast: Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Arian Brody, Bob Hoskins.
As career saving comebacks go, they don’t get much better than Ben Affleck’s compelling performance in Hollywoodland. Ben has clawed his way back with this potential Oscar-grabbing portrayal of the tragic George Reeves, the Fifties star of TV’s Adventures of Superman.
And lets’s face it, the guy had an Everest scale climb after starring in some of the decade’s biggest poopers. Who could forget his ill-fated colaboration with then fiancee Jennifer Lopez in the phenominally bad Gigli three years ago? Part man, part movie star, part kitchen cabinet, from Daredevil and Paycheck, via the ego-excess of Pearl Harbour, he has managed to redefine the phrase "wooden" for a new generation. He's not so much an actor as a jaw-line with ambitions.
So hurray for Hollywoodland, a tantlising thriller come biopic which investigates the mysterious death of 45-year-old George from a single gunshot wound to the head in 1959. The cops say it’s suicide but some believe there’s more sinister explanation including downbeat private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody). He gets himself hired by George’s mother Lois Smith (Helen Bessolo) and starts looking into the sad life of George - who wanted the glittering film career of Clark Cable but had to settle for low-budget TV shows.
While the film also charts the downward spiral of Louis’s life - his divorce and the decline of his relationship with his son, it’s George’s story that is fascinating. It unfolds in a series of flashbacks. Jobless he hangs out at celebrity haunt Ciro’s jumping in photos behind Rita Hayworth to guarantee his face in the gossip columns. There he meets Toni (Diane Lane) the older and beautiful wife of MGM vice president Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins).
George tells her that after a big part in Gone With The Wind he’s reduced to the lead in cheesy TV mini-series The Adventures of Sir Galahad, a production so brassic, God knows what she means by this...could be boracic as in lint?-FG “we all rode the same horse”. Despite this admission she falls for the charming pauper and they embark on an affair.
He reluctantly becomes a kept man and secretly hopes she’ll have a word with her powerful hubby and get him a decent role. She doesn’t and he’s reduced to becoming the Man of Steel, wearing a grey and brown superman suit because they can’t afford to shoot it in colour.
But against the odds, the show becomes a success and he gets to swap the suit for a blue and red one. Affleck’s performance is so heart-breakingly bittersweet, mixing George’s vulnerability with his magnetism and gorgeous optimism and downright retchedness at not making it big. Lane also rises to the challenge as a woman in a loveless marriage, besotted with her toyboy and in constant fear he’ll leave her.
Hoskins is brutal as the hard-nosed movieman with links to the mafia and a one-track money-making mind which he demonstrates when his only observation about Gone With The Wind is: “That picture made money.”
The faultless period settings are wonderful and the message is similar to LA Confidential. Scratch the surface and everyone is rotten to the core in the glamorous world of Hollywood.
Nothing new there but an undeniably fascinating subject nonetheless beautifully and wittily examined in this film. As the film progresses the whodunnit element loses momentum and it starts to wane disappointingly. The film offers three likely explanations for his death but annoyingly refuses to commit itself to any of them.
The film isn't perfect. It's awkwardly paced and having Adrien Brody as a tough PI is like castin Morph as the next Dr Who. But by playing Reeves so sensitively - a man whose dignity and career gets hung up to dry along with his bright blue jumpsuit - this is Affleck asking for our redemption. And you know what? He might just get it.
As Keats once wrote: there is "no fiercer Hell than the failure of great ambition." And he never had to wear his pants on the outside either. If only George had been given such a great role as Ben, then maybe things would have turned out a whole lot different.
