I watched Hollywoodland last week. It begs comparison to the other recent, true-but-unsolved-crime period piece, The Black Dahlia. It's a favorable comparison for the former film. Black Dahlia stars Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart (two actors I've never really cared for) as L.A. cops and Scarlett Johannson as the third point of their love triangle. Ostensibly, it's a move about the murder of the lady posthumously referred to as "The Black Dahlia," one Elizabeth Short; Short was killed in a gruesome, ritualistic slaying in 1947. Instead, the movie is mostly about the relationships among the three main characters, none of whom are particularly appealing. Eckhart's character, Lee Blanchard, becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the killer, to the point of abandoning other assignments and posting police files all over the walls of his rented apartment. After Blanchard is killed while tracking down a lowlife just released from prison, his partner Bleichert (Hartnett) continues following up the leads and eventually finds the killer. The story spends too much time on the relationships among these characters and the ensemble of other players, most of whom seem like padding. Solving the crime in the last five minutes seems like a bit of an afterthought, which makes the choice of titles of the film all the more bewildering. The story can be hard to follow at times, and when the movie's over, you find yourself wondering why you bothered in the first place.
Unlike The Black Dahlia's clumsy efforts to suggest a solution, Hollywoodland doesn't try to posit a definite answer to the question of who killed George Reeves. This is a story about the death of one man and the impact it has on the life of another, the fictional character of Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) and the real-life actor who was the first to portray the character of Superman for television, George Reeves (played credibly by Ben Affleck, who had to put on a few pounds for the role). Simo is a down-on-his-luck PI, a former cop, who is looking for the one big case that will make his career. When his ex-partner tells him that Reeves's mother is not convinced that he committed suicide, he thinks he may have found it. Reeves had a small-time career in Hollywood before landing the role of Superman for the televsion series The Adventures of Superman, which he thought very little of. He always had dreams of making it big in Tinseltown, of being the next Gable or Brando. After his role as Superman, which won him millions of adoring fans, he found it difficult to get the kind of "serious" work that he most desired. In essence, he had been typecast as Superman. This is a fictionalized tale, although, in commentary, the director (Allen Coulter) insists that all scenes with Reeves were meticulously researched and authentic. The most commonly-accepted explanation for George Reeves's death is that he shot himself in 1959 at the age of 45, in despair over his inability to make the kind of career for himself that he always envisioned. The movie also puts forth several alternate scenarios, including that he was killed out of jealousy by his former lover, that he was murdered at the behest of her husband, and that he was accidentally killed by his then-current lover; however, at no point does it attempt to state that one of these explanations of his death is the true and correct one. Instead, Brody's character, who experiences his own roller-coaster ride of ups and downs as he digs into the case, comes to realize that, whatever the truth behind the death of Reeves, the greater lesson could be learned from his life; he sees that he, like Reeves, was groping for a dream that may always be out of his reach and that it might be better to treasure the good things that he does have, lest he too lose them all. In the end, we see him picking up his son, after apparently having gotten a steady job. It was particularly interesting to me, my only previous connection to the story being that I had seen some of the television stories in syndication years later, to see this early instance of how being typecast in a role can really destroy an actor. To me, it seems as though this sort of phenomenon can be a blessing or a curse or both, depending on how the actor chooses to respond to it. Typecasting can be damaging in the short term, as William Shatner found himself broke and virtually jobless after Star Trek's run ended; however, because of the enduring popularity of the show and its characters, a series of films was produced starting in 1979 and he and his fellow cast members were able to "cash in" on their identification with those characters.