Don’t call him a movie star

HE is a man who should have been a big movie star but wasn’t, whose romantic choices worked against his career, whose good nature often seemed at odds with his deep ambition, and whose decision to don a cape and tights brought him momentary success but in the end left him wondering where it had all gone so wrong.

Ben Affleck’s portrayal of George Reeves in Focus Features’ upcoming “Hollywoodland” already has many rushing for the thesaurus in search of synonyms for “comeback.” Reeves, the original TV Superman, committed suicide at age 45 after it became clear that the role had not only been the zenith of his career but also its curse. So identified was Reeves with the Man of Steel that he could not find meaningful work after the series ended.

“Hollywoodland” is an original script that examines the possibility that Reeves’ suicide was actually murder. Following Louis Simo, a private detective played by Adrien Brody who has been hired by Reeves’ mother, the story lifts various familiar rocks exposing the creepy crawlies -- Was it the monomaniacal studio head? The exec’s spurned wife? The grasping gold-digger? -- that so often lurk in the damp shadows of noir paradise.

But in the end, the real bogeyman of “Hollywoodland” is failure -- his career nailed to Superman’s shadow, his long-term affair with the wife of the studio executive soured, creating a powerful enemy, Reeves faced an inevitable future as a Tinseltown has-been.

Though Affleck’s career and, one hopes, mental health have never sunk as low as Reeves’, there is a certain poignancy in the role choice and the performance. The actor’s own salad days -- the Butch and Sundance partnership with Matt Damon, the 1998 Oscar win, the magazine covers, the breathless universal interest in what he would do next, whom he would date next -- have been over for quite some time.

Films like “Gigli” and “Jersey Girl” turned the cover boy into a punch line, while his overly publicized engagement with Jennifer Lopez came to an end that shamed even the most devoted supermarket newsstand junkies.

“Why Matt and not Ben?” became something of a Hollywood parlor game. Damon too has had failures, but he has created a career that balances performance (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) and franchise (“The Bourne Identity,” “Ocean’s Eleven”). At the box office, Affleck’s could not even break even; although none of his last five films tanked as badly as “Gigli,” none made money. Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, the media became increasingly unforgiving.

“There has always been a disconnect between the guy the press was talking about and the guy I knew,” says Alan Roos, who directed Affleck in the romantic drama “Bounce,” which also did not fare well despite the presence of then-newly Oscar-anointed Gwyneth Paltrow. “He came out of nowhere, the press wanted to build him up and then tear him down.”

Or as longtime director and friend Kevin Smith recently said in the wake of the Tom Cruise-Sumner Redstone slap-down: “I’m sure Tom Cruise can now appreciate how bad Ben Affleck had it for two years.”

Smith also believes that Affleck’s acting reputation has suffered unfairly in recent years.

“The weird and unfair thing is that people will say, ‘Is he turning it around?’ ” says Smith of the Reeves role, “when there was nothing to turn around. In a fair world, he would have been given props for ‘Surviving Christmas,’ in which he played completely against type, but that came in the middle of the whole Benifer explosion.”

All of which may explain why Affleck has been keeping a relatively low profile these days, refusing to acknowledge the “comeback” buzz and declining interview requests before “Hollywoodland” lands in theaters Friday.

“Certainly Ben has experienced profoundly the nature of public life,” says “Hollywoodland” producer Glenn Williamson. “How the perception can be one thing and you know the reality is another, and that, I’m sure, affected his performance.”

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‘In a great place’

IN Reeves, Affleck had the opportunity to capture the many tensions, internal and external, of stardom. Playing it big and utterly straight, he adopts the theatrical elocution of the time and veneers his square-jawed face with an expression of studied, carefree charm that barely conceals his character’s growing frustration and bewilderment.

His Reeves may be naturally handsome, but the ease he affects as he attempts to break into the fascinating and fascist studio system of Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s is as calculated as his wince-worthy attempt to be photographed standing beside Rita Hayworth. His laugh is large but always a bit forced, his rejoinders smooth and clever but just a half-beat too late.

“With Reeves there is a sense of ‘I am not being seen as I really am,’ ” says director Allen Coulter. “And Ben certainly had the ability to channel that.”

Unlike Reeves, however, Affleck has clearly found real happiness -- his marriage to Jennifer Garner and the recent birth of their daughter has, according to friends and every subsequent interview the actor has done, brought new focus and meaning to his life. Which, Williamson says, was just as important to his portrayal of Reeves as any of the less pleasant experiences.

“We were the beneficiaries of Ben being in a great place personally,” the producer says. “He’s happy, he’s acknowledged that he wanted to do better, more complicated films. He’s a very smart man. He looked at the films he’s done and realized they were maybe not his best performances and wanted to focus on this character piece.”

For years, Affleck has been drawn to big, splashy roles in big, splashy films. Though early attempts, such as “Armageddon,” moved him from the indie model to the blockbuster, he never quite opened a big film that did well. “Daredevil,” Affleck’s own attempt to find redemption in a cape, made money, but the sequel went to Affleck’s co-star and now wife, Garner.

“Ben was attracted to the movie-star roles,” says Roos. “He’s a very unpretentious guy who likes movies like ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘Daredevil,’ which, when they work, work big. And when they don’t work, there is no place to hide.”

Affleck’s over-publicized romance with Lopez and their last-minute wedding cancellation put a dent in the actor’s career that even Reeves would have appreciated. “It’s really set the tone for every other celebrity relationship since,” says Smith. “I mean, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn -- have either of them admitted they’re engaged? Or Brad and Angelina, are they even officially ‘dating’ yet? I’m sure after all that, after ‘Gigli,’ he would have much rather kept a low profile, but he had three movies in the can.”

Not that “Hollywoodland” is a safe haven -- L.A. noir is always tricky and an actor playing an actor a perilous enterprise, especially when the character is resolutely B-level. To make Reeves sympathetic and believable, Affleck had to do more than mirror the heartbreak of Hollywood. First, he had to capture the nuances of a man not of this time -- Reeves is not only his first character role in a while, it’s his first attempt at a real period piece. Even in “Pearl Harbor,” he was playing a cocky, often smart-alecky modern guy, something Reeves absolutely wasn’t.

“Ben projects a boyishness just like most actors of his generation,” says Coulter. “The actors of that time were the exact opposite. They were very adult, very contained. There was a charm but also a reserve there, a stillness.”

With its two-pronged time frames and multiple story lines, “Hollywoodland” is ambitious for Coulter as well, being his first feature film after years in television, most recently on “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.”

Although Affleck expressed an interest in the role early on, the filmmakers wanted to cast Simo, the private detective, first. When Brody agreed, they turned immediately to Affleck, who is, they both agree, not only a fine actor but also close enough in age to Brody to make the contrast and similarities of their characters more striking.

Neither was concerned, they say, with Affleck’s recent track record.

“It was an interesting choice for him,” says Coulter. “And I am always drawn to interesting choices. For an actor to do something he has never done before.”

What Coulter and Affleck were more concerned about was taking a modern leading man and turning him into an aspiring actor in the ‘40s and ‘50s, as the studio system was beginning to creak under its own weight, a man who was, perhaps, already an anachronism.

“With Reeves, you felt that his timing was always off,” says Coulter, who along with screenwriter Paul Bernbaum did copious research into the case and the personalities. “He was the kind of guy who could put a good face on, but always there was the sense that his life had slipped through his fingers.”

Affleck not only had to bulk up a bit to play the beefy Reeves, he had to adapt the demeanor of a stage actor. Reeves, Coulter points out, had come up through the Pasadena Playhouse, he had had voice lessons, probably dance lessons, and all of that had to show in Affleck’s performance.

“This was the first time Ben had played a man older than he is,” says Coulter. “And a man who would never put his feet up on a table. It is a completely different carriage, different mannerisms.”

Relying equally on technique and emotion, it is precisely the kind of role that can launch, or relaunch, a career, and already people are emerging from early screenings remarking that Affleck is a really good actor after all. Something that makes colleagues such as Roos, who say they’ve known it all along, laugh out loud.

While, as Smith points out, Affleck is concentrating on his directorial debut in “Gone, Baby, Gone,” there would be some delicious noir-like irony of such a thoroughly modern performer having to play a period failure to reignite his fan base.

“Ben has a patina, if he works on it,” says Coulter simply, “of a big, old-fashioned movie star.”

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.