Sunset Boulevard

Having finally watched what is considered to be one of the greatest of all Hollywood films I can now check Sunset Boulevard off my list of "to be watched" movies. Simultaneously, though, I'm adding it to my list of favorite movies, and pretty high up no less.
It's the story of a writer, Joe, who's broke, with a couple of B movies to his name and virtually no prospects. By the kind of accident that modern audiences probably wouldn't buy, he finds himself in the house of Norma Desmond, a once great star of silent movies who became a forgotten has been when audio revolutionized the cinema.
The condition of Norma's house, dilapidated and filled to the brim with extravagant and elaborate junk (not to mention more pictures of herself than one could possibly count), reflects the condition of her mind. Everything is like it would be in a silent movie. Her eye popping house needs no audio, her exaggerated gestures and overly expressive facial movements require no words to inform anyone what she is doing, saying, or thinking.
She refuses to move forward, she insists that her audiences are craving for her return to the screen and she hopes they will forgive her for abandoning them. So sure is she that she will be embraced by the crowds, the studios, and her director Cecil B Demille, that she has penned a monstrously long script to be her comeback vehicle.
Joe sees an opportunity to make a lot of money by rewriting the script and tightening it up, even though he knows she will fail grandly in selling it to a studio. At first he lives in the spare room above the garage, but it isn't long before he has been moved inside to the grand master bedroom that had been the quarters of her three previous husbands. The butler, Max, hovers around the cavernous mansion always giving the impression that he knows and is more than he lets on.
By the time Norma and Joe have finished the script she is buying him clothes and expensive finery, hosting a new years party just for the two of them, and taking him out for drives in her magnificent old car. Joe receives no money from Norma, rather she looks after him. He is her companion, in her eyes he is her true love, and he hates the position he's in. He cannot bring himself to detach because the setup is easy, a long time contract with no options, which is the way he likes it, even though he's a prisoner.
The story goes from chilling to bleak, but it is never boring, and as Norma speaks her famous last line we are seriously unnerved as only really great movies can make us.
Movies have changed so much over the decades that watching this require a kind of suspension of disbelief in the opposite direction from movies nowadays. In action movies and stuff we have to shrug it off that a hero can jump six stories and land in a roll that leaves him more or less unharmed. With the older movies they had stories to tell, real stories that could not possibly be told completely in an hour and fifty minutes. So we suspend our disbelief at the idea that a broke writer might happen to turn into 1086 Sunset Boulevard where this washed up old silent film star lurks, enveloped in her monumental narcissism, with a picture just waiting to be written.
It isn't really realistic, but neither is the Hollywood industry. So much in the movie is a reflection of what is real though. For example, oh, I don't know, maybe girls who think that a relationship is way more than it actually is, and wind up leeching onto an unsuspecting guy because he returns like the slightest, possibly feigned, interest in what she has to say. Not that I'd know anything about that personally, but then again I'm waiting for the day that a few people I know announce "Alright Mr. Demille I'm ready for my close up."
In all seriousness though, this movie doesn't gloss anything up, it's honest about the sheer impossibility of the very industry that created it. It's as great a film now as it was when it was first released, perhaps it's even better now when you realize how accurate it was and is. It's bested its own leading lady by being the very thing she must have known she could never be; timeless.

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