The hunk of Hollywood

Reviewed - Hollywoodland:THE huge sign that still rests in the hills above California's dream factory originally read Hollywoodland and was placed there in the 1920s to advertise a real estate development of that name.

Allen Coulter's debut feature, a fresh rake through the industry's stinking garbage cans, allows the title's suggestion of a theme park to emphasise the flimsiness of the façade that publicists and producers erect to shield the ordinary humanity of their stars.

The film's theme is the life and death of George Reeves, a washed up actor who finally gained fame playing Superman on television before apparently shooting himself dead in 1959. Paul Bernbaum's spiky script suggests that the actor's mother, unconvinced by the official explanation, might have employed a private detective to uncover the truth.

The sleuth, played with gaunt doggedness by Adrien Brody, discovers that Reeves was having an affair with the glamorous wife of Edgar Mannix (grumpy Bob Hoskins), head of MGM pictures, and - for that and other reasons - begins to admit the possibility of foul play.

The main body of the film sticks a little too closely to gumshoe conventions to generate overmuch interest. But the flashback sequences, in which Ben Affleck's Reeves and Diane Lane's Toni Mannix seek consolations for mildly disappointing lives, stand comparison with some of Hollywood's best dissections of its own rotten guts. The crisp delicacy that creeps across Lane's features when she glances at her unglamorous boyfriend poignantly communicates her grasp of galloping age, and Affleck has never been better as a man increasingly aware that he has achieved the wrong kind of fame at the wrong time of life.

Anybody who finds themselves asking why we should be surprised that Ben is so convincing as a faintly wooden has-been should feel deeply, deeply ashamed.