Movie Review: 'Rules Don't Apply'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Warren Beatty has wanted to make a movie about legendary, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes -- and play a role that he feels he was born to play – for decades.
But maybe he just waited too long.
And because the rules of moviemaking do apply even to a moviemaker and star with as accomplished a record as Beatty, Rules Don't Apply is problematic.
Not dreadful, not off-putting, not disastrous. Just compromised. Severely.
His portrayal of the aviation tycoon and movie mogul is fun to watch as far as it goes. It's just that it doesn't go very far, and instead of merging with the young romance also on display, it clashes with it.
What Beatty has done is made two movies at once, but combined them in a way that reduces each, not to rubble but to the wistful land of What Might Have Been.
As the producer, director, co-writer, and star of Rules Don't Apply, notorious perfectionist Beatty has to take a hit for this nostalgic passion project falling so far short of perfection.
Beatty as Hughes emerges from the shadows about a half-hour in, immediately stealing focus from the two characters in his employ whom we've just been introduced to.
Lily Collins plays starlet Marla Mabrey, a small-town Baptist and Virginia virgin, songwriter, and ex-beauty queen trying to make it as a contract actress in Los Angeles in the late fifties.
Alden Ehrenreich plays Frank Forbes, one of Hughes' drivers, a budding Methodist entrepreneur with a fiancee back in Fresno who is assigned to chauffeur around the couple-dozen young aspiring actresses Hughes has employed and housed.
Marla and Frank are pretty quickly enamored of each other, but Hughes' strict rules include a prohibition of any romantic interaction between the drivers and the actresses.
This does not, of course, apply to notorious Hollywood womanizer Hughes himself.
Collins and Ehrenreich are attractive and appealing, but neither they nor their characters are all that fascinating. Besides, they're fictional and Hughes is real. So when Hughes shows up, he immediately steals focus: his weirdness alone makes him the most compelling character by far.
Which leaves us wondering why each of these narrative thrusts keeps interrupting and undermining the other.
Beatty's storied career as the director of Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Dick Tracy, and Bulworth, his Oscar as Best Director for Reds, and his 14 Oscar nominations for writing, producing, directing, and acting certainly earn him the right to go somewhat off the rails here.
But what he has done. whether intentionally or not, is concoct a romantic comedy-drama that's as bizarre as Hughes himself.
That's neither a compliment nor a complaint, just an observation.
The other reason Rules Don't Apply -- written by Beatty and Bo Goldman, and fast and loose with chronology and the facts, which the film admits in a caption up front -- registers as a train pulling in late to the station is that two other memorable films covered so much of the same Hughes-legend territory, Martin Scorsese's The Aviator dramatically and Melvin and Howard (scripted by Goldman) comedically, both of which gave us samplings of Hughes' idiosyncratic obsessiveness-compulsiveness and his attempts to stay out of what he called the "loony bin."
Beatty mixes in a crowded supporting ensemble that includes his real-life wife, Annette Bening, as well as Matthew Broderick, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, and a number of others, but nearly all of them are underemployed and very few of them makes an impression: it's as if Beatty is distracting us from the film's failings with the familiarity of the on-screen faces.
That helps the film remain watchable, but contributes to the feeling that, despite being years in the making, this loaf is still half-baked.
So we'll fly over 2 stars out of 4. Like Howard Hughes' beloved Spruce Goose, Rules Don't Apply is big and handsome, but doesn't really fly.
