Hollywoodland
Hollywoodland is a lush, vibrant recreation of 1950s Hollywood, and outside a handful of fine performances, that's the best thing it has going for it. If the movie had been centered around a completely fictional event, it might have worked brilliantly. But the suspicious suicide of Adventures of Superman star George Reeves is too juicy a story to take a backseat to the imaginary life of a downtrodden private eye. Director Allen Coulter struggles to reconcile the two stories and never quite makes it because solving the mystery of what really happened to Reeves is a lot more interesting than what happens to Louis Simo, the fictional detective trying to break a case everyone else marked an open-and-shut suicide. Hollywoodland never fails to hold your attention—a vivid historical landscape and very good performances see to that—but it fails miserably in the satisfaction department by getting no closer to the truth about what happened to Reeves, who was miserably typecast by his role as Superman and held back by his mistress, the wife of MGM studio boss Eddie Mannix. It's a fascinating cautionary tale of how the old studio system could chew a man up and spit him out, and it's the story we really want to see.
- February 18, 2007
DVD Extras
Three featurettes on recreating 1950s Hollywood and intertwining Reeves' and Simo's stories, explaining the decision to focus on the fictional P.I.; some deleted scenes, most of which involve extraneous evidence; and audio commentary by the director.