It’s been 15 years since Hollywood legend Warren Beatty was last seen on our screens, and a further 3 years since he was also in the directors chair too. Now he is back with a passion project of his that he has been evidently gestating for decades, so much so that is in fact he is now 25 years older than the reclusive eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes was in 1958 when this biopic is set .
We don’t in fact see Beatty’s Hughes until a good 25 minutes into the movie and we just hear him in the background manipulating others to get exactly what he wants out of them. Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) is the latest starlet to arrive in L.A. under contract to Hughes and his RKO Studios. Like the other 20 plus young women that Hughes has already lured to the city with the offer of stardom, Marla is given a rather luxurious house in the Hollywood Hills and the services of Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) a dashing young chauffeur.
What sets her apart from the coterie of other starlets who she attends acting classes with every day, is that fact that this chaste Baptist girl also has her suspicious mother in tow (played by a scene-stealing Annette Benning).
Hughes himself keeps his distance from everyone, and so young Marla is desperate to know when she will finally get to meet him and be able to do the screen test for his latest movie as promised. Frank on the other hand, who had left his childhood sweetheart fiance back home, is only here to try and persuade his wealthy employer to invest in a scheme that he has to build some affordable housing on a plot of land he wants to buy in the Canyons.
Both of them are frustrated by their lack of success in getting to Hughes, and they are also forming an romantic attachment to each other despite the warning from Frank’s manager Levar (Matthew Broderick) that any liaison between a driver and one of the girls would end up in instant dismissal. Hughes who shows far more passion for his planes than for any of the girls that are holed up around town, finally sends for a very nervous Marla who takes to the bottle for dutch courage which has unexpected consequences for them both, and which turns out be somewhat disastrous for her.
The movie is beautifully styled and exquisitely shot to show the glamorous era of Hollywood, albeit that all these young girls were exploited at the whim of their wealthy benefactor. Beatty portrays Hughes as a colorful maverick and although he touches on some of the aspects of his eccentric behavior, he seems much more intent on humanizing the mogul rather than highlighting his apparent madness. There is just one scene at the end when a distraught looking Hughes is confined to bed and really looking his age and with the soundtrack at full volume blasting out Mahler’s Third Symphony, that he suddenly reminds one of Gustave Aschenbach (Death In Venice).
Beatty has filled all the cameo roles with a first class cast who include Ed Harris, Martin Sheen, Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, Paul Sorvino, Steve Coogan and an unrecognizable Candice Bergen, but he gives them very little to dig their teeth in. The biggest disappointment, and at no fault of his own, is young Ehrenreich as Frank who chose this as his follow-up role after his stunning breakout performance in Hail Caesar!, as this rather stiff script never gave him a chance to shine.
On the whole Rules Don’t Apply is a very amusing and entertaining period costume romantic comedy, albeit a tad too long, which It is just the fact that it was helmed by Beatty, that makes one expect something far better than this.
