Hollywoodland
We were at Disneyland last year with our friend Jude. We watched the parade, a collection of bright parade floats peopled with plastered smiles and gaudy puffy dresses. To a loud collage of tunes they twirled as if dancing a waltz. It was a pastiche of every Disney movie, and the crowd loved it.
Jude pointed to one of the decked out girls on a float. "I recognise her," she said. "She was in the play I saw this week. It was awful."
I was struck by the thought of this girl, acting in an (apparently awful) play one day, and waving stiffly with a pasted-on smile to a crowd at Disneyland the next. The dance between paying the bills and dedicating oneself to a craft (acting in this case), was never clearer.
I can't pretend profound insight, but I've spent enough time on stage and been around enough professional actors (and wished I were in their shoes) to have a little understanding of what drives people to do it.
My father says that every actor and entertainer desires the maximum success, the most fame, the biggest audience, no matter what they claim. I think they have a particular audience in mind, not simply the largest imaginable. For some it's their peers, some wish for respect within the profession, others wish to be seen by the cool kids, the intellectuals, the people next door, their parents. Mostly, however, I think the impulse is to work and make a living, forced to take jobs like, well, waving and dancing on a parade float in costume, and hope that the audience is going to be there as you go along.
My point is - if success and a mass audience is the main thing that matters to a performer, then most actors who had achieved fame and mass appeal would be fulfilled and satisfied with their careers and their lives, right? Clearly this isn't the case - it doesn't take a genius to see that the majority of successful actors have profoundly ambivalent relationships with their fame and fortune. Very few have any kind of control over the path they take, just ask the actors from any of the Star Trek series' of the past forty years. The ones who seem happiest in the end embrace their fate, accept the fame and fortune it's brought them, at the expense of the choices to work and larger respectability they would have liked. Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock, wrote the book "I Am Not Spock" in 1975, only to follow it with "I AM Spock" twenty years later.
So, then, to George Reeves, reluctant Superman actor, probable suicide victim, and subject of the film Hollywoodland.
The film is not a biography, and I know little more about him than what is shown in this film, in a superb portrayal by Ben Affleck. He was famous, beloved by a huge number of people, mostly under the age of ten. He was Superman. But that wasn't the audience he wanted, he wanted respect from other actors and an adult audience. He struggled with accepting his fame as Superman, his desire for respect, and the simple need to work, to the point that it got the better of him, and, according to the official account, he killed himself.
The film jumps between two stories, that of Affleck's Reeves, and of private investigator Louis Simo (played by Adrien Brody) who doggedly pursues the feeling that the official story of Reeve's suicide doesn't make sense, and his own web of personal and professional compromises.
The ambiance of 1950s Los Angeles is beautifully portrayed through the photography, the sets and the actors. I was particularly taken with the score, which evoked the period without using falling into clichés or copying classics like Jerry Goldsmith's Chinatown. Aside from Affleck, the actress who jumped out at me was the character of Kit Holliday, Simo's co-worker and girlfriend, played by Caroline Dhavernas. It was a small role but she played it so effortlessly, I couldn't take my eyes off of her.
The flaw with the movie is that Simo's story isn't as interesting or thematically rich as Reeves's, the two linked only superficially, so that the whole film suffers when it spends as much time following Simo as Reeves. When Affleck is on screen, however, he's captivating, you feel the accumulated weight (literally) of his decisions, the compromises that have trapped him into a life he didn't want but can't pretend are anyone else's fault but his own.
Could he have accepted his good fortune, such as it was, even if it meant wearing large red underpants to work - outside his trousers? Could any of us?
Hollywoodland | Ben Affleck | Adrien Brody | Chinatown | George Reeves | Superman| Caroline Dhavernas| Leonard Nimoy| Star Trek