Oracle Online

This can be a rather blessed exercise, especially since Hollywood has a rather storied history. However, if the film ends up being miscast, miswritten, or just plain dull, all that glamour is sucked out the window.

What you’re left with is nothing more than a cinematic whisper of the industry’s early years. This is unfortunately the case with film’s latest foray into the past, Hollywoodland.

Hollywoodland is the tale of George Reeves' a B-list actor of the 1950s who finds some fame in a serial version of Supermančall the while having an affair with a film executive’s wife.

The movie starts, much like Sunset Boulevard, with a crime scene that clues the audience into the fact that George Reeves (Ben Affleck) is dead, purportedly a suicide.

The film then follows two plot lines: one that features Reeves’ brief flirtation with fame, the other examining the life and investigation of the detective (Adrien Brody) who uncovers the mysteries of Reeves’s death.

The murder is possibly the most notorious in Hollywood history, and is one of the most lurid unsolved mysteries on record. However, under the weight of Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody, the film falls apart.

To blame both seems like an odd case since Brody, who has been riveting in the past, is the finer actor. Each actor, though, makes the film denser and less appealing than it could be.

Brody, wry and sexy, appears to have watched many past detective dramas uses his considerable charm to make his character a rapscallion. Due to a heavy-handed subplot that involves he and his estranged son, the film drags and Brody doesn’t appear to know what to do. Should he focus on his son or the emerging murder surrounding him?

The film never decides what priority is more important and as a result, Brody’s character remains two-dimensional, nothing more than a stereotypical private investigator.

Affleck, on the other hand, seems to have been perfectly cast--he’s a bad actor playing a bad actor. Yet his dumbstruck lummox is incredibly uninteresting, a fatal flaw in a murder mystery.

Though the audience may have a mild interest in seeing what ultimately happens to his Reeves, Affleck’s lack of likeability or star power makes him a side player to the glowing Los Angeles backdrop.

Instead of chewing the scenery, which Affleck has done in the past, he simply becomes lost in it. He blends in with the Art Deco decor and is overshadowed by better actors like his lover played by Diane Lane or her husband Bob Hoskins.

Had the film taken the time to sort out its plot or to cast actors who knew how to inhabit that Old Hollywood glamour in a modern world, this film could have been a splendid trip back to nourish tales of femme fatales and corrupt studio bosses.

The film’s lack of star power, however, makes it a restless, directionless vehicle not worthy of the fine source material it attempts to emulate.