nuts4chic - film review
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Hollywood, the Fifties: wannabe actor George Reeves, beefcake looks but naive soul, is enchanted by beautiful but ageing Toni Mannix, the wife of a powerful studio executive.
She does anything to launch his career just to keep him by her side, but all she comes up with is Superman in the serial Man Of Steel.
George effectively becomes a TV star, but his audience is made of kids. Feeling betrayed in his ambitions, wanting to break through into real stardom, he breaks up with Toni, dates a younger wannabe starlet and embarks on his own private shipwreck.
One night in 1959 he is found shot dead in his room. Suicide? Murder? Accident? Private Detective Louis Simo is appointed to investigate but all the tracks fray as he discovers many inconvenient truths; one thing is for sure: someone doesn’t want him to know the truth. And the truth still lies unknown.
The first winning element of the film, in fact, is presenting all possible solutions for the mystery, and not choosing any; this allows former TV director Allen Coulter (The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex And The City) to concentrate on his characters, living on the dark side of Hollywood studios, filling the air with their private obsessions and well hidden weaknesses.
An astonishing cast helps him in the detailed and colourful depiction of this human seraglio: Diane Lane shines as an older femme fatale whose beauty is a double-edged sword, making her struggle to maintain dignity and lust at the same time.
Dignity is also a key issue for Reeves, whose ambitions are humiliated from the start – the audience’s hilarity watching him acting in From Here To Eternity proves how cruel typecasting can be; when he realizes that Toni has nurtured him while clipping his wings, he fights for an impossible redemption.
Affleck, whose career also has been going down the slope for a while, has given the performance of a lifetime, switching from self-confidence to hurt to despair; in his eyes we can read the tragedy of a man who has completely missed out on his life. Hopefully, Affleck’s brave choice will put him back on hot star-meter.
Strong support comes from the rest of the cast: ominous Bob Hoskins as MGM boss plus mobster Eddie Mannix; or Robin Tunney as bloodsucking, scornful Leonore, who dates George to favour her career, while he dates her to escape Toni’s cobweb (the poor chap jumps out of the frying pan into the fire).
And Adrien Brody is of course effective as Simo, a detective with a devastating private life and incredibly short-sighted in his job: more and more intrigued by Reeves’ death, he dismisses a jealousy obsessed customer who ends up horribly murdering his wife.
Nevertheless, this film is not entirely satisfactory. All the elements for a neo-noir are there, the characters are multi-faceted, the plot is thrilling, the packaging is polished; yet the whole picture is painted on a loosely woven cloth, and the final result is not as strong as it could be.
This is probably due to Coulter’s inexperience in cinema, meaning that his direction lacks of personality and style; or, more probably, Paul Bernbaum’s script shows no balance between Reeves’ story and Simo’s: too much footage is dedicated to the detective, in order to trace a (very thin) parallel between the two. But the detective, to be honest, never stirs up our interest, and Brody’s physicality is just – unappealing. Maybe Simo’s character should have been dried up a bit, if not even disguised as faceless reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane.
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