HOLLYWOODLAND
by
Gil Mansergh

The narrator said he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but actor George Reeves (TV’s Superman) wasn’t faster than the speeding bullet that ended his life. Ben Affleck is very good as the ersatz man of steel, and Adrian Brody is perfect as the dogged detective investigating the actor’s supposed suicide in “Hollywoodland” a fictionalized investigation of the actor’s death.

Directed by Alan Coulter, (fresh from HBO’s “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under“) the film’s stylish recreation of the 1950’s is it’s greatest strength. Its doggedly slow, back and forth presentation from when Reeves was alive and well to after he was dead, is its greatest weakness. Opening like a flashback scene from TV’s forensic detective shows, we enter a house, head up the stairs and into the bedroom where the body of a nude, middle-aged man is sprawled on the bed, blood spatters the wall and a Luger lies on the floor. “Suicide?” asks one of the detectives. “Looks like,” is the answer. “I guess the bullet didn’t bounce off this time,” the detective says nodding to a photo showing Reeves in his Superman costume.

Then we follow a pinch-faced man (Larry Cedar) into a classic, 1959, stucco, wrought-iron-railinged and swimming-pooled apartment building where a septuagenerian muscle builder lifts weights on his balcony, and voyeuristic glimpses of other residents are provided by the noises coming through their open windows. Stopping at a doorway, the sounds inside are of a couple coupling, but the man keeps knocking and the door is eventually answered by a pretty blonde with her blouse unbuttoned and a tousle-headed man buckling up his pants. This is the apartment of Louis Simo, (Brody) a licensed private investigator more than willing to keep collecting $50 a day from a husband who is sure his wife is having an affair even though a week of surveillance says she is not.

Thrown a bone from a fellow detective, Simo tracks down George Reeves’ distraught mother Helen Bessolo (Lois Smith), who has taken the bus from Indiana to find her son’s killer. “I know my son. He starred in films with Clark Gable and Frank Sinatra. He would never take his own life.” Of course the mother has, in a nutshell, described exactly why her son would commit suicide. Starting with a flourish as one of the red-haired Tarleton twins in 1939’s “Gone With the Wind,” Reeves went on to star in some forgotten movie serials and eventually became TV’s Superman. Typecast, his extended part in “From Here to Eternity” was cut from the picture after screening audiences sniggered when they recognized Reeves without his cape.

Despite constant support from his pragmatic agent (Jeffrey DeMunn), Reeve’s career was reduced to considering his becoming a professional wrestler. The only thing which kept the actor solvent, was his being a boy-toy for Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a former Ziegfield girl with an open marriage to wealthy studio executive Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins). “If she’s happy, then I’m happy,” Mannix says about his wife’s affair, and the three often went nightclubing together.

Lane has a great line when she picks up Reeves. “I only have another seven years before my bottom drops” she says, and that is just about how long the two last as a couple. “I need to go to New York,” Reeves suddenly announces while packing his suitcase “My future is in New York.” But when the actor returns he has a new girl on his arm. Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney) is a wannabe starlet who thinks Reeves made a ton of money as Superman, and the two live together in the same house that Toni Mannix bought for her lover. It is here that Reeves was found shot to death a few months later.

But who did it? Screenwriter Paul Bernbaum weaves factual research about the death with creative fiction. “There have always been three particular theories: (1) he committed suicide; (2) he was shot either on purpose or accidentally by Leonore Lemmon; and (3) he was murdered on orders from Eddie Mannix,” Bernbaum says in the press notes. Unfortunately the screenplay’s Rashomon-like reenactment of several possible death scenarios wears thin. It turns out that “who-done-it” is just a Hitchcockian “McGuffin,” a plot device that really isn’t that important. What works best is the disclosure of the off-screen personalities of the Hollywood characters with all their facades. “Hollywoodland’s” most rewarding investigations are into the relationship between Simo and his ex-wife (Molly Parker) and Superman obsessed son (Zach Mills); the relationship between Eddie Mannix, his wife Toni, and his PR man (Joe Spano); the relationship between Reeves and Lenore Lemmon: the relationship between Reeves and his mother, and the relationship between what we see on the TV and movie screens, and ourselves.

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