Hollywoodland

The advertising for Hollywoodland makes much of the film being about the supposedly mysterious death in 1959 of George Reeves, the huskily handsome actor who gained his greatest fame playing Superman on television in the early 1950s. The death was officially ruled a suicide at the time, and Allen Coulter’s film is in part a kind of speculative and retrospective portrait of Reeves. But an even bigger part of the film focuses on the travails of one Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a rather sleazy private detective who sees an opportunity for career advancement of his own in the exploitation of suspicions that Reeves’ death was actually a murder. While the Simo plot seems to strangle on morbidly juvenile hysteria over a trumped-up murder mystery, the fragmentary biographical glimmers of Reeves (Ben Affleck) with his lovers, an older woman (Diane Lane) and a younger one (Robin Tunney), generate such a rich sense of maturity and charm. Coulter’s direction and Paul Bernbaum’s writing seem to rise to a whole other level in the Reeves-Lane scenes.