Blah-la Land

I don’t have a huge amount to say about the awkwardly-titled Hollywoodland that my fellow NRO reviewer Frederica Mathewes-Green didn’t already say: It’s lush and gorgeous, meticulous with its period detail. Allen Coulter’s direction is surprisingly adept. He simply knows how to shoot and stage a scene, even one with weak writing; several times throughout the film I was impressed by how a scene that, on paper, would’ve looked terribly bland, really worked. It’s got some strong, captivating performances and no truly weak links amongst the actors (Bob Hoskins is especially brilliant as studio chief Mannix, projecting a weird mix of caring, honorableness, seediness and despondency)…and yet its still only a middling film. It’s a classic example of why screenwriters and Hollywood producers are always yammering on about the importance of structure, because it’s got a fascinating story, but the inherent suspense and excitement in it is washed away by a poorly designed narrative structure.

Basically, the story follows two separate threads: One looks at Ben Affleck’s George Reeves and his topsy-turvy relationship with Toni Mannix, a studio mogul’s wife. We know from the beginning that Reeves dies, allegedly by his own hand, and that’s where the other story comes in. Private Detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) follows the investigation and comes to believe that Reeves may have been murdered. The movie flips back and forth between the time before and after Reeves’ death, giving us information more or less as Brody learns it.

So in some ways, it’s a procedural, with Brody following the leads and tracking down information. But the filmmakers were obviously hoping for more, and decided that Brody needed to be humanized—given a throughline of his own—with a slew of extraneous scenes involving another case and his tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife and son, a timid little kid who’s been ham-handedly forced into depression over the Reeves’ death (Superman can’t die, daddy, and all that). Most of that stuff is just filler, character development that doesn’t really change the rest of the story. And the two storylines just don’t congeal. It always feels like you’re watching two separate stories, each of which is gorgeously shot and almost interesting on its own, but doesn’t quite have the narrative oomph to grab your attention more than sporadically.