Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply Is a Crackling Dark Comedy But a Limp Love Triangle
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Like his sometimes collaborator Elaine May, Warren Beatty ranks among our most revered and least prolific auteurs. Beatty doesn’t make many movies as an actor, writer or director so when he does it’s a big deal. Or at least it should be!
2016’s Rules Don’t Apply marked the Academy Award winning lady’s man first movie since 2001’s Town and Country but it was a story he had been trying to tell since the 1970s, after encountering Howard Hughes in a hotel and becoming fascinated with the man.
Despite Beatty’s power and the movie industry’s enduring fascination with Hughes, it nevertheless took four long decades for Beatty’s Hughes movie to hit theaters and bomb with critics and audiences alike.
Given Beatty’s reputation as a True Auteur and Major Filmmaker, critics were perhaps surprised that his return to film after a decade and a half was so slight and modest.
Hughes’ two-fisted tale has been told many times, in many ways and from all sorts of angles. Rules Don’t Apply portrays Hughes as an outsized figure of legend, a genius and a madman, a womanizer, aviator and movie maker. But in Rules Don’t Apply he’s also someone’s goofy boss. It’s only a few steps away from being a glorified feature-length pilot for a Howard Hughes-themed sitcom: My Boss Howard.
By the time he was able to realize his dream of playing Howard Hughes, Beatty was seventy-nine years old or roughly a quarter century older that Hughes was in 1958, when most of the film takes place. When he made Rules Don’t Apply, Beatty was also nearly a decade older than Hughes was when he died at 71 in 1976.
To compensate for Beatty’s advanced age he is shot throughout the film in deep shadow and near-total darkness. Barbra Streisand would be mortified by the lengths to which Beatty goes here to look younger and more attractive.
In Rules Don’t Apply, Howard Hughes is a figure of myth and legend, seldom seen but the subject of endless conversation and speculation. In that respect he’s like Bigfoot or the actor playing him. Also like a Sasquatch or Beatty, he long maintained a harem of beautiful actresses he vaguely promised to put in movies.
That’s right: Yetis are notorious players. Nobody wants to talk about that side of their personalities because it’s not “politically correct” but the elusive monsters are notoriously successful with human women.
Howard Hughes was also famously successful with gorgeous dames with gams that don’t quit despite spending much of his adulthood wrestling unsuccessfully with intense mental illness.
Rules Don’t Apply chronicles the legendary businessman and artist at a crucial juncture of his life and career, as he fought a ferocious one-man war to hold onto what was left of his sanity, freedom and business empire.
Beatty’s Hughes is extraordinarily high-functioning for someone with so much obvious mental illness and extremely mentally ill for someone so high-functioning. When the movie opens he has clearly lost much of his mind and is in the process of losing even more but the fight is still strong within him.
Beatty plays the icon of machismo and madness as a powder keg of cantankerous energy exploding in all directions and a marathon talker prone to free associative rambling. That Hughes is a romantic figure in any sense is a tribute to Beatty’s extraordinary personal charm and magnetism.
Rules Don’t Apply came out a year before the seismic revelations of #MeToo and while it was politely ignored for the most part or politely dismissed as a pleasant trifle I suspect it would have been received much differently if it had come out a year or two later.
2016 was perhaps the final year a movie could depict a wealthy, straight, extremely powerful white businessman using his connections within the film industry to control the romantic, personal and professional lives of beautiful, vulnerable, powerless young women as fundamentally harmless rather than sinister.
Rules Don’t Apply sees Hughes the same way adoring sorta starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) does: as someone who is clearly more than a little unhinged and does NOT have purely altruistic, wholesome plans for the beautiful actresses he has under contract but also as someone brilliant, fascinating and utterly unique, not to mention impossibly wealthy and consequently extraordinarily powerful, a king of a man with the power to make dreams come true.
In a performance neither as star-making as Hail Caesar or as career-destroying as the lead role in Solo, Alden Ehrenreich plays Frank Forbes, an earnest young man who enters the royal court of King Howard and tries to figure out a way to make the monarch’s madness work for him personally and professionally.
Frank is that most tedious of creatures: an ambitious young American with a dream even more boring than most: he wants his insanely wealthy boss to invest in a real estate scheme of his devising.
Will the reclusive billionaire go into business with his eager would-be protege? Who the hell cares? Frank’s business ambitions are a real non-starter but so is the love triangle at the film’s center despite charming performances from Ehrenreich and Collins.
Ehrenreich’s performance begins more strongly than it ends because the film takes its time introducing Beatty as Hughes. As with Solo the likable actor is hopelessly overshadowed by a more charismatic older icon.
In Solo Ehrenreich couldn’t compare with the public’s love of Harrison Ford in one of his signature roles. In Rules Don’t Apply Ehrenreich’s character instantly becomes seventy-percent less compelling and charismatic the moment he shares the screen with Beatty in a dream role as one of the most fascinating eccentrics in American history.
Collins is wonderful in the juicy role of a smart spitfire more interested in writing and reading than living the glamorous life onscreen or off. She’s a clean cut Baptist girl next door who falls for Hughes for being smart and weird and intense rather than insanely rich and powerful.
She gets just close enough to the great and greatly flawed aviation mogul to come face to face with his horrifying limitations as a human being. Collins has terrific chemistry with Beatty and a much weaker connection with Ehrenreich but their love triangle sags because one side is infinitely stronger than the others.
As a cantankerous comedy about a charismatic lunatic with all of the power and money in the world and little in the way of common sense or practicality Rules Don’t Apply soars. It is particularly lively and engaging in gut-busting set-pieces where Hughes terrorizes Ehrenreich and a pea-green British officer played by Steve Coogan by flying like an absolute maniac and drives potential business partners, particularly one played by a hilariously apoplectic Oliver Platt, mad by not walking fifteen feet to meet them in person even with 400 million dollars hanging in the balance.
As a love triangle and a coming of age story, however, Rules Don’t Apply is much weaker.
It’s easy to see why Beatty spent decades trying to make his Howard Hughes movie happen. It’s a spectacular role for a true movie star even if everything surrounding it is handsomely mounted and painless but decidedly less auspicious.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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