Rules Don't Apply

I have so much to say about this gem that I'm not sure where to start from. Let me just say that as soon as I heard Gutav Mahler's Adagietto coming out of the Hollywood Bowl while the young virginal couple sit in the car facing the moon, I was transported to Venice, the Venice of Luchino Visconti in Death in Venice. Throughout the film Mahler's Adagietto kept magically coming back so, for me, that's the film. Art and commerce, too much and too little, life and death. Warren Beatty, writer, director, producer also stars as Howard Hughes, a character who's lived in Warren Beatty's mind for decades. He moved me. It was clear why Hughes was a character that could allow Beatty to talk about very personal things without having to do it in first person. - Mia Farrow told Michael Caine between takes in Hannah And Her Sisters: "Woody is telling me things through you" - Here Warren Beatty is telling us things about him through Howard Hughes. A mass of contradictions that can only be explained in the heart and mind of an artist. I'm already a huge fan of Alden Ehrenreich right from Tetro and here he is wonderful, tender and real. Lily Collins is new to me but Annette Bening, well Annette Bening reminded me in her few minutes on the screen that she is one of the greatest actresses we've got. Death in Venice and the last image of Howard Hughes left me with a knot in my throat. I will certainly see it again, just as sure that Rules Don't Apply will be rediscovered in years to come.

Rules Don't Apply is a showbiz comedy about two star-crossed lovers. But it might just as well be director, producer and star Warren Beatty's mantra. Every so often the man steps out of whatever dimly lit bungalow he lives in and comes out with a big, bold project that stands quixotically and defiantly against the mores of the time. Reds (1981) grated harshly against the easy money proclivities of the Reagan Era while Dick Tracy (1990) looked backwards through the pulpy pages of loose leaf Americana while we looked on towards a post-communist world. Bulworth (1998), arguably Beatty's most radical film ripped off the facade of the yuppie, blue dog Clinton administration, revealing deep fissures between white liberals and the dreams differed of black Americans (albeit as told through the coddled, tone-deaf worldview of a limousine liberal). Now with Rules Don't Apply, Beatty is in full navel-gazing mode, making a movie so thematically simple that it's conventionality is its own form of radicalism.

The film details the brief stint in La La Land of one Marla Mabrey (Collins), the recently crowned Apple Blossom Queen and new RKO starlet on-call. She arrives fresh-faced from Fresno and encounters naive company driver Frank Forbes (Ehrenreich) who, like Marla, hopes to meet their employer Howard Hughes (Beatty). Problem is, this is 1958 and Howard Hughes has not spoken to anyone outside of his close circle of confidants for years. Caught in a state of arrested development, Frank and Marla begin a chaste attraction which alters their futures in unexpected ways.

Beatty portrays Hughes as a full on Falstaffian character; full of wit and intelligence but far too reckless and in-his-own-head to be taken seriously. He fits himself ever so awkwardly into the center of the action, allowing an ensemble cast of A-listers to orbit around the chaos that Hughes creates. It's an interesting mess to be sure. Hughes is simultaneously the most interesting character in the entire movie and the broadest; less a person than an event like the sinking of the Titanic.

Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich simply can't hope to compete for attention and screen time, even if their pleasant mugs immediately bring to mind James Dean and the luminous Audrey Hepburn respectively. They make the most out of their piddly roles with Collins managing to warble the catchy old-fashion title song and make the whole scene seem relevant. Yet when compared to the exacerbated gasps of Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Steve Coogan and Matthew Broderick, our two lovers are completely washed out of the film's more interesting excesses.

And there are some pretty fun excesses. There are solid if low- hanging comedic setups, snappy dialogue and goofy sequences of frenetic action which would otherwise seem slight if not for the fact that comedies are straight-up never made like this anymore. They also keep the ball rolling, making sure everything makes sense without much dead air.

In a career spanning nearly seventy years, Warren Beatty is about the closest thing to Hollywood royalty you got still working today. If you ignore his filmography, and have the patience to sit through a few stale jokes, Rules Don't Apply is basically a lesser Cafe Society (2016). Yet considering Beatty's work is often ahead of its time, Rules Don't Apply is basically a 90's Ganz/Mandel comedy mimicking the sensibilities of the 30's taking place in the 50's starring a guy not relevant since the 80's.

When I first saw the trailer that announced Warren Beatty's "comeback" I was thinking at best I would find the movie above mediocre. I personally understand Beatty's stasis as Hollywood Royalty, but I myself am not the biggest fan of any of his films to feel for him like that.

I am a big fan of the film's topics, like Howard Hughes who I love both as Hollywood Royalty and his love of Aviation, two points that Beatty's movie hits upon greatly as he portrays an older version of Hughes, when his reputation turned from eccentric billionaire to complete wack job.

But Beatty's role is more of supporting one as the story centers around two people in Hughes life: Marla Mabrey ,a young scarlet with good Christian values who came to Hollywood and became one of Hughes contract girls, and Frank Forbes, Marla's driver, also with the same Christian values as Marla, that's being broken down by Tinsel Town.

It was met to be one of those quirky comedies about a quirky man, and it should have worked but it did not.

Well if you don't use it you could loose it, cause unlike other senor filmmakers, like Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, who make film after film in order to keep the blood of creativity flowing, Beatty was living the good life having fun in the son.

Beatty may have taken a little too much time off however, and it does show in this below mediocre film.

Beatty's superstar black book could not help him, either. The parade of movie star cameos only pointed out how dull this movie is.

So, not nearly what I would expect from icon, Warren Beatty but I think I'm putting too much on a man that I don't personally have on a pedestal.

Makes all the right jabs but never hits the spot.

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Without a doubt, Howard Hughes was one of the most eccentric and enigmatic figures of the 20th century. A billionaire who went into the movie business, he left his mark on a number of industries. Martin Scorsese focused on part of Hughes's career with "The Aviator". Now Warren Beatty does so with "Rules Don't Apply". This one looks at a relationship between one of Hughes's starlets and her driver in the 1950s. It's not a great movie, but infinitely better than Beatty's last movie, the crime against humanity "Town & Country" (which rivaled Woody Allen's worst movie "Everyone Says I Love You" in being an obnoxious fetishization of neurotic New Yorkers having affairs with each other).

The only thing that drags this movie down is the appearance of two people: Steve Mnuchin (as a banker) and Louise Linton (as a potential starlet). They're now husband and wife. He's Treasury Secretary, while she Instagrammed a photo of herself and tagged the designers, and proceeded to make a let-them-eat-cake remark when a woman criticized her use of a government plane for travel (this was after she published a book purporting to tell of a year that she spent in Zambia, but the entire nation of Zambia disdained it as a promotion of the white savior trope).

Anyway, it's a good movie otherwise. Aside from Beatty, it stars Lily Collins, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman and Ed Harris. To put that another way, it stars Clyde Barrow, Snow White, Carolyn Burnham, Capt. Willard, Jack Ryan, Ferris Bueller, Murphy Brown, a creepy boss and Jackson Pollock.

I'm surprised that Warren Beatty returned to directing after almost 20 years with another film about a disturbed man who is falling apart. Even more, why make another Howard Hughes film? You'd learn more about Hughes by watching the Tommy Lee Jones film or "The Aviator." Mr. Beatty was trying to be contemporary with the editing of the film (4 editors by the way) by cutting away from a scenes abruptly that were starting to get interesting.

The pace of the romance between the two lead characters was uneven and thus hard to believe. The costumes, production design, cinematography and much of the acting was great, but the narrative was confusing. There was a lot of interesting quirkiness and style, but because the point of view was scattered, it was hard to really get to know the characters.