Howard, the recluse with a roving eye
Rules Don’t Apply (12A) Verdict: Curious but compelling ★★★✩✩
WARREN BEATTY’S first film this century (he is the director, writer, producer and star) fortuitously arrives in cinemas at a time when he would doubtless like to be talked about for something other than his unwitting role in screwing up the Oscars.
Rules Don’t Apply does the job nicely. It is set at the turn of the Sixties, with Beatty playing the legendary movie mogul, aviator, inventor, recluse and all-round weirdo Howard Hughes — possibly one of the few men to generate as many Hollywood anecdotes as Beatty himself.
A strong cast includes Beatty’s wife Annette Bening as the strict, ambitious mother of would-be starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins). She arrives in Hollywood from small-town Virginia to do a screen test for the famous Mr Hughes.
His office has supplied her with a dishy driver, Frank (Alden Ehrenreich), but their obvious mutual attraction is complicated, partly by Hughes’s insistence that his employees should keep their hands off the talent.
So, to whom will Marla lose her small-town virginity? Suffice to say that there is a distinct whiff of dirty old man about Hughes, when eventually he appears, and one distinctly creepy scene makes it impossible to overlook the yawning age gap — more than half a century — between Beatty and Collins.
Nonetheless, Beatty succeeds in making Hughes appear more sad than seedy, both corrupted and persecuted by his own extreme wealth. Really, this is Marla and Frank’s story, but neither of them can escape their benefactor’s strange, poisoned aura.