Rules Don’t Apply here, but they probably should
Rules Don’t Apply (out of 4) Starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Annette Bening and Matthew Broderick. Directed by Warren Beatty. Opens Wednesday at major theatres. 127 minutes. 14A
Warren Beatty’s obsession with sex requires no introduction or explanation, having long been subject to scrutiny both factual and fanciful.
So, his decision to frame Rules Don’t Apply, the first film he’s both directed and starred in for 18 years, as a carnal investigation is hardly a shocker.
What does astonish is that Beatty, who also co-wrote the screenplay (with Bo Goldman) does so within the confines of a Howard Hughes biopic, the very thing he’s been strenuously denying that Rules Don’t Apply is.
Evocatively lensed but clumsily staged, this is a movie at war with itself, although it’s not until Beatty shows up as eccentric billionaire Hughes, about 30 minutes in and shrouded in half-light, that the battle is apparent.
After a prologue set in 1964, along with an onscreen quote of warning from the late Hughes (“Never check an interesting fact”), the story jumps back to the Hollywood of 1958, notably about the same time Beatty first hit Tinseltown.
Actress wannabe Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), a small-town beauty queen and virginal Baptist, arrives in L.A. accompanied by her officious mama (Annette Bening). Marla has been offered employment by Hughes, who yearns to be a movie mogul as well as an aviator and industry tycoon.
Marla and mama are driven around by another new Hughes hire, Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), a devout Methodist who is engaged to his childhood sweetheart. This should prevent any romance between Marla and Frank, which in any event is strictly verboten under the strict rules governing all Hughes employees.
Wouldn’t you just know it — check that movie title again, which is also the handle of a tepid soundtrack tune sung by Collins — but Marla and Frank don’t feel beholden to the company ban on bedroom activity or to prudish church and social values.
And while they slowly get to know each other, the film suddenly lurches into a full-on Hughes biopic, with the crazy meter set at “11” as all his ofttold neuroses and OCD habits (such as buying up all the banana nut ice cream he can get his hands on) come to the fore.
Hughes drifts in and out of the shadows, with Beatty playing him as a sort of moustached Indiana Jones imitator bent on mischief rather than adventure.
Marla disappears from the movie for a long stretch, as Frank and various Hughes employees and business interests — cue minor characters played by Matthew Broderick, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Steve Coogan, Ed Harris and more — enter and exit the frame.
Marla’s eventual sexual coming-ofage is so preposterous, not to mention crassly offensive in its gender power implications, it’s as if Beatty is determined to sink his own movie rather than submit to anything so conventional as a traditional love story or three-act structure.
But what’s the title of this U.S. Thanksgiving turkey again? Ah, yes: Rules Don’t Apply.