Warren Beatty seems to have taken the title of his new movie Rules Don't Apply a tad too literally because in his position as writer, director and star of this Howard Hughes biopic he abandoned all rules of coherent storytelling, resulting in a true embarrassment for all involved parties. On the plus side, Alden Ehrenreich, playing an ambitious young driver who awkwardly romances a young starlet (Lily Collins) while quickly becoming Hughes' right-hand man, has already been cast as the new Han Solo in Disney's forthcoming spin-off prequel about the once and future Millenium Falcon captain. Rules Don't Apply and Ehrenreich's remarkably bland performance in it can't change that, nor should it considering how strong he was in Hail, Caesar! earlier this year. Plus, Lily Collins doesn't exactly embarrass herself even if her eyebrows oddly upstage her performance as does Beatty's nonsensical direction. On the down side...well, there's everything and everyone else.
Where to even begin. Perhaps some background will help: Thanks to The Simpsons and other such parodies, we tend to forget about Howard Hughes the pioneering entrepreneur who bedded movie stars and conquered the aviation industry, and instead remember Howard Hughes the reclusive eccentric overcome by OCD:
Warren Beatty obviously saw the opening as well, but the rest of the world didn't see much profit in it, forcing Beatty to persevere for years in a seemingly endless search for funding. Meanwhile, Beatty oddly mimicked Hughes by receding from the spotlight, morphing into Annette Benning's arm candy at awards shows and nothing more. Rules Don't Apply is his first new movie since 2001's long-forgotten Town & Country, and the first film he's written and directed since 1998's Bullworth. Perhaps he stayed away for too long because he seems to have forgotten everything which once made him the Oscar-winning director of 1981's Reds.
To be fair, his basic instincts are sound. Rather than make this is a straight biopic, like an unofficial The Aviator: The Later Years, he's gone the Me and Orson Welles and My Favorite Year route, both historical romantic dramedies in which two people happen to fall in love while rubbing elbows with a Hollywood icon, Welles for the former (obviously), Errol Flynn for the latter. Thus, Rules Don't Apply is really meant to be a movie about a young driver with real estate dreams and a talented young songwriter taking a stab at film stardom as one of Hughes potential contract actresses at RKO Studios. Their mutual connection to Hughes is what draws them together, but it's also what drives them apart, as the eccentric billionaire waves through their lives like a wrecking ball. However, they are all eccentrics in their own way, battling restrictive religious upbringings or societal pressures or impoverished childhoods or even their own minds to be the type of people who defy the rules and prosper because of it.
And, fine. That's certainly workable. However, Beatty seems unwilling and incapable of completely yielding the spotlight to his younger co-stars, both of whom seem pleased to be working with a Hollywood legend but unsure how to react to the realization that this legend is delivering a performance which wouldn't even cut it in dinner theater. As Hughes, Beatty's every weird laugh, occasional repeated line (because, y'know, OCD), bizarre way of saying "daddy" and manic mood switch is meant to convey the character's madness, but as I watched it all I could think of was Beatty running lines with his wife (who has a small role near the beginning of the film) and imagining her struggling to be honest with him, praising him for being so good when he's so clearly not. But, hey, she was just so happy he was ready to get out of the house again, and all of his old friends and fans were happy to chip in (i.e., Matthew Broderick, Candace Bergen, Alec Baldwin, Steve Coogan and Oliver Platt all have small roles).
Beatty's performance, destined to be denied all those awards it is so clearly reaching for, is not what sinks the movie, though. The true culprit is the editing, which is so unbelievably choppy and undisciplined that it feels like this is a Howard Hughes movie which has been edited by Howard Hughes himself from beyond the grave, though if that were true he would have likely favored more gratuitous cleavage shots (or perhaps simply chanted "Brains!" since in this scenario he'd clearly qualify as a zombie).
In Rules, we see several scenes of people holding court with Hughes in a dimly lit hotel room, struggling to keep up with him as he appears to be having multiple conversations at once, repeatedtly lifting a nearby phone to bark orders to some unseen underling. That's the same level of discipline Beatty brought to the editing process, showing no patience for coherent story or scene construction and cutting from one scene to the next with such rapidity I honestly thought something had gone wrong with in the projection booth in my theater, like they had somehow set the film on fast-forward without actually speeding up any of the dialogue.
Scene after scene abruptly ends, and while that might seem pleasing at first in a "wow, they're really plowing through all the exposition here" kind of way it quickly grows tiresome, especially as you realize it's simply how the entire film is going to go. As a result, years fly by in the story without expanation, but don't worry - Beatty will at least use on-screen text to let us know when the story has shifted to Las Vegas because all the archival footage of the Vegas strip somehow doesn't get that point across on its own.
When overwrought pieces of musical score come and go with no organic set-up, suddenly overwhelming a love scene or poking you in the ribs with "gosh, it must have sucked working for ole Mr. Hughes, huh" humor, you just go with it because with Rules Don't Apply that kind of thing is par for the course. Mostly, though, you're just desperate for it to finally end.
THE BOTTOM LINEWe do not lack for cinematic odes to Golden Age Hollywood (recent examples include Trumbo, My Week with Marilyn and The Last of Robin Hood). These films tend to come and go without much serious fanfare, netting the occasional acting nomination (or even win) on the awards ciruit. However, they are at least competently made movies. Not so much Rules Don't Apply, which belongs more on bad movie podcasts like We Hate Movies than on an awards ballot unless it's The Razzies.
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