The opening scene of Hollywood Dreams is a shoddy footage of an audition tape. The director of a stage play tapes a woman trying her hand in theater. During the audition, she suddenly bursts into tears, numerous times, because she’s very nervous. Not knowing anything, laughing seems like the appropriate response to watch this strange opening scene. It is the first of many comical scenes involving her sudden emotional outbursts. But as we learn more about her, the sudden tears devolve from a funny quirk to a hint that perhaps something deeply sinister is throwing levers inside her.
Hollywood Dreams proves that not all Hollywood endings are happy, even when you’ve achieved the dream. The film follows Margie Chizek (Tanna Frederick), a sweet but thoroughly hapless and naïve girl from the Midwest, living a nomadic life in Los Angeles as but one of the many starving actors looking for work. Through luck, the homeless ends up being taken in by the kindness of a gay Hollywood producer couple, living in their huge mansion’s guesthouse with Robin (Justin Kirk), a rising actor close to his superstardom. Margie quickly falls for Robin, and sexual tension rises between them. But there’s only one problem: he’s gay.
Margie is a complex character that has more cobwebs than your grandfather’s attic. She has talent, but her quack personality renders her almost useless in most situations. Even her primary talent is to emulate the overacting of old stars from the 1930s Hollywood glitz, which blends with Margie’s own highly operatic personality. Frederick’s portrayal of Maggie is pretty mind-boggling. It’s not over-the-top, because the character herself is already very high-strung and an emotional crapshoot. She’s absorbing and naively charming one minute, and then she becomes almost unwatchable because of how uncomfortable it is to see her be so naïve. Her relationship with Robin especially becomes a real emotional whirlwind for her, and the film doesn’t veer into typical rom-com territory, providing relationship problems that can only exist in Hollywood.
The story surprisingly works and still packs hefty drama, despite not having any stakes. Unlike the typical inside-look on the glam life of Tinseltown, there is no backstabbings or shady deals. Every character introduced turns out to be helpful and nurturing towards her, and things go well for a change. This is the anti-The Player. The city of Hollywood still becomes the dreaded villain of the story, but without the cliché of the city chewing her up and spitting her out. Hollywood Dreams spins a different dark side, one that disguises itself as opportunity and ambition. Margie’s already fragile state, wallowing in denial because of a tragic past, is further encouraged by Hollywood’s promise of dreams-come-true, making her even more vulnerable. Watching the film is essentially watching a real person with real goodwill self-destruct in pursuit of a dream.
It takes a while to get used to director Henry Jaglom’s usual style, which is very off-the-wall and improvisational. Not as snappy as Altman, yet not as realist as Cassavettes. It rests cozily in-between, which provides quite a special mood that separates Hollywood Dreams from any other Hollywood-based insider look. Fascinating as it is, he often lets the actors play out a scene to its maximum stretching limit, and it hurts a lot of the power in them.
Hollywood Dreams has some memorably defined characters with their memorable stories, but on the whole, it feels more like a filmed acting workshop instead of a movie.
"Hollywood Dreams" opens May 25, 2007 and is rated . . Written by Henry Jaglom.
